


in a dawn so very dark

by ysengrin



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Angst, Curse Breaking, Emperor Armitage Hux, Enemies to Lovers, Horror, M/M, Malevolent Forests, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:20:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25430770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ysengrin/pseuds/ysengrin
Summary: Hux and Ren conquer a kingdom on the edge of a dark forest.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 21
Kudos: 286





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted february 2, 2016 - july 5, 2016

‘Was it a childhood dream of yours ?’ Ren had asked him, at the beginning of that day. Although that was uncharacteristic of him, Hux had chosen to believe that there was something fateful about their conversation, just as he'd fancied he could taste victory in the air, or at least the smoke of battle, tainting the sharp tang of the falling snow.

‘To rule an empire', Ren had clarified, his voice low and soft and always faintly condescending. 'To wield unlimited power. Is it something you've always wanted?'

‘Of course not’, Hux had lied.

Although perhaps it hadn't been a lie but rather a knee-jerk reaction to Ren’s uncanny ability to read people. It was a talent the King had always known how to use to his advantage, and rumour had it that when the knight was not waging the King’s wars or submitting to an assiduous training, he dwelled in the dungeons of the royal fortress, interrogating rebels and all manners of war criminals who had dared to oppose Snoke's rule. It hardly mattered that Ren was now Hux’s ally – that he had laid his sword at Hux’s feet and forsaken his King in order to take part in what was, in Hux’s opinion, an impeccably planned coup. There was something forever unsettling about the knight, about the way he seemed able to penetrate Hux’s inner thoughts while remaining utterly unable to cloak his own, his doubts and rancour showing clearly across the uneven planes of his pale face.

‘You should be wary’, Ren had warned him. The sun was coming up by then, the greyish light of dawn outlining Ren’s hunched shoulders, the fine black armguard and the dented helmet in the crook of his elbow. ‘It is always easier to dream and scheme than to hold onto power once you’ve obtained it.’

It was on the tip of Hux’s tongue to remark that Ren knew little of what he was talking about - a man who could not fight his own battles, who perpetually sought a master to point his sword in the right direction. He wasn't given an occasion to answer, however. The knight had slammed the ungainly helmet atop his head, and Hux wouldn't have risked taunting that foreboding figure, not with his back to the whispering forest that had corrupted his sleep with dreams of failure, not as he faced a strenuous battle that would be all for nought should Ren fail to deliver on his promise to kill King Snoke.

‘Make me an emperor’, Hux had said, instead, looking anywhere but at the narrow slit in Ren’s helmet. And if his voice quavered, he told himself that it was in anticipation.

‘Was it a childhood dream of mine?’ Hux thought – remembered – as he returned to the edge of the forest at the end of the day, leaving behind what seemed like an endless stretch of blood-drenched fields. It might have been the setting sun that cast such a reddish glow upon the snow, for the battle had not spread so far from the confines of the fortress. Hux recalled the bodies of the King’s knights as he had seen them in the throne room, black mounds of tangled cloth and armour like an offering of so many fell beasts, their blood seeping into the cracks of the paved floor. A mapped route leading to the throne where the King’s old, wizened form still lay, one hand upturned and extended, fingers half-unfurled as if even in death, Snoke would still command obedience. It was a gesture the King had never had towards Hux but that he could recall, dimly, in association with Ren, the King beckoning his favoured knight closer, and Ren moving towards him slowly, as if a hook were anchored within his chest and Snoke was toying with the line.

Hux resolved that it must have been a dream, all of it, a dream of power and of the consecration of victory. Otherwise, how could he explain that he was walking away from it all, walking back towards the forest, knee-deep in snow, feeling the cold seeping into his bones, following the tracks of a subordinate who had already served his purpose.

Captain Phasma had been waiting by the throne, and she had handed Snoke’s crown to Hux, her cool blue eyes unusually bright. She had called him ‘your Highness’, even though as far as most officers were concerned, the coup was a concerted action, and Hux had secured the support of the other generals with the promise of a shared leadership. It had been intoxicating, these words in the mouth of one who was hardly prone to showing regard, not to Snoke, not to anybody else. In Phasma’s eyes, he had already knocked over Snoke’s crumpled form and sat in his place, his back ramrod straight against the carved back of the throne, leaving the imprint of his booted feet in the slippery pool of the King’s blood.

And yet. He hadn't climbed into the throne but instead he'd doubled back to where this had all started, walking through the turmoil of the fortress, now a makeshift prison and a makeshift hospital. He had crossed the courtyard, sidestepping wounded soldiers and the bodies of two fallen knights, avoiding his officers, who found it all too easy to come to him for advice – fodder and shelter, and who should deal with the prisoners who had used the rampant chaos to escape the dungeons, and who was to bring back to heel the wayward soldiers who were pillaging the fortress, snatching silver candlesticks off the mantles and taking daggers to the brocaded furniture, defacing the King’s bedroom and running down the servants. Any officer could have given orders to bring back a semblance of order, and Hux briefly wondered why they seemed to rush to him begging to be governed, when they did not yet know he intended to steal the power for himself. It must have been the recognizable hair, he reflected, striding along the drawbridge; only half-aware of the impression he left in his wake. He had smoothed back his hair with blood-covered gloves, and there was something imperious and sobering about the sleek red hair and the cold dead eyes that glided over the men without fully taking in their presence. It was a whisper that began at his back and that a few hours earlier, he would have been glad to hear – ‘He’ll put the crown on his own head by sundown, just you watch.’

By the time the whisper grew to a steady stream of spellbound rumours, he was far away, however, walking straight through the first houses of the nearby village and up the field behind it. He passed a first and then a second encampment, but he did not seek assistance, did not requisition soldiers, or a horse, or a sword. He had lost his own sword hours before then, a family heirloom that he had driven through a soldier’s chest right beneath the walls of the fortress, the man’s body tumbling down into the ditch, taking the sword with him.

He entered the forest, shivering although he refused to cross his arms across his chest in an attempt to ward off the cold, berating himself for being stubborn about this when he hadn't found the courage to renounce this whole endeavour. No one expected him to retrieve Ren – not anymore, not with Snoke reduced to a saggy pile of wasting flesh. Something was spurring him forward, though. It reminded him of Snoke’s outstretched hand, and of Ren stepping closer although his whole body was angled away from Snoke, like a tree curving in and around a particularly strong gust of wind. For a wild second he wondered if this could have been some outlasting influence of Snoke, drawing him towards certain death at the heart of the woods.

‘There might be a knight we can turn’, Phasma had said, back when it was only the two of them in Hux’s tent, after another failed attempt at reclaiming the westernmost region of the kingdom.

This conversation had occurred at the end of two weeks of pathetic skirmishes in a mountain pass, a waste of troops and equipment in the midst of mountain storms and of the occasional flooded camp. When they had tried to relocate further up the mountain, the rebels had descended upon them like a flock of vultures, picking apart their remaining resources, dragging men out of their tents in the middle of the night, using their superior knowledge of the inauspicious terrain to their advantage. Hux had arrived with two hundred men and retreated with a handful – and to add to his disgrace, those who had not been killed had willingly defected to the enemy. Hux had found himself wishing he could have blasted apart the mountain itself, bringing it down upon the rebels and his own troops in a final feat of glory. Anything rather than face the King after that debacle.

Hux and Phasma had had little in common before then aside from their blind loyalty to Snoke. That night, Hux had let the captain pour him a few too many drinks as he sat sprawled on the floor of his tent, his chest heaving with an anger he could not contain and that he hardly knew where to direct.

‘What is it that we are fighting for?’ he'd asked Phasma, who watched him impassively, despite the exhaustion perceptible in the slump of her shoulders. Blood slowly trickled down her cheek, from a gash in her forehead that Hux had seen her stitch up some minutes before. He hadn't waited for an answer. ‘We fight to restore order to this country. To the world.’ The words pouring out of his mouth were a half-formed tumble of frantic ideas at odds with his usually stern composure, a dream of power bringing about a long-lost or as-yet-to-be-found sense of self. ‘Snoke has lost sight of how this country should be run. These wars will not be won with a flick of his trembling fingers. This kingdom will not be governed by an old man hiding behind his personal guard like they’re a bunch of attack dogs.’

By then, it had become clear that the King had sent them to the mountains to die, and Hux had felt some relish to let these words of high treason slip past his lips.

‘If this is what you want to do’, Phasma said, her voice even in spite of the three or four empty bottles that now littered the floor of the tent, ‘there might be a knight we can turn.’

There were as many stories about this forest as there were about Snoke’s mysterious rise to power, some thirty years ago. Hux knew that those among the King’s protégés who had even the faintest hope of becoming knights must subscribe to a series of strange rituals in the midst of the woods on the darkest night of the year. Hux would have claimed loudly that the rumour of a power lying dormant in the forest was tattle-talk, a product of the villagers’ over-active imagination. But he had seen Snoke maintain his hold over the kingdom despite his apparent frailty. He had watched him order a knight to slit his own throat, had stood by as the King pried the whereabouts of a foreign general from a man’s mind as if he were reading it aloud from an open book. He was ready to accept, within the confines of his own mind, that there were powers at work in the land that he could not master or understand on his own.

Following this train of thought, it was easy to justify his attempt to recover the King’s errant knight. It was a matter of reshaping Snoke’s prized weapon so Ren would serve Hux’s own uses. This whole quest was motivated by strategic concerns, and certainly not by whatever had transpired between them on the night that had preceded the military coup.

The generals had agreed in the early stages of planning their revolt that the coup should occur in the middle of winter. The King would therefore be cut off from any potential allies on the other side of the border. The support that the rebellious faction of the military possessed within the fortress would ensure that there would be no prolonged siege. Of course, back then Hux could not have foreseen that he would end up stumbling across frozen ground hours after the end of the upheaval, on the receiving end of the cascades of snow that occasionally fell from the surrounding trees, searching the ground for traces that had long since been covered up.

‘What do you mean, he left?’

His voice had sounded sharp and brittle as Phasma looked on with that unflagging gaze of hers – and he'd found himself wishing he were, if not as void of feeling as she seemed to be, at least as apt at burying his own thoughts. Too often he had felt betrayed by his smooth, youthful features, by the easiness with which a fierce blush would come to colour his pale cheeks.

‘He set off in pursuit of one of the escaped convicts’, Phasma said. ‘It seems in the confusion that followed the attack, one of my soldiers took it upon himself to free all the prisoners. This includes those your Highness might have preferred to keep captive. I will deal with the soldier who committed that mistake, and I have sent some of my men after the fugitives. Might I add that the generals have gathered in the council chambers? I believe they await your arrival.’

‘I must find our wayward knight’, Hux said, an authoritative but careless avowal. ‘We will need him’, he added firmly, and wished Phasma did not have these few extra inches on him that made it incredibly hard to stare her down.

‘Certainly, your Highness’, she said, and for a fleeting moment, he could have sworn the title was not a sign of respect, but a bitter joke.

The woods were fir, a voluminous tangle of rustling branches that let the snow through but not the light, and at times it took Hux a moment too long to realize he was not diving in the dark gap between two trees but rushing straight into a conifer, his gloved hands vainly scrabbling for purchase against the resinous trunk.

After the wild cacophony of voices in the fortress, bouncing from stone wall to tapestry and back again until the din had all but driven mad those who had not been wounded in the battle, after the clamour of the fight in the fields surrounding Snoke’s castle, swords ringing against shields and soldiers shouting their throats hoarse as they threw themselves at one another, the near-silence of the forest should have felt like a balm. Instead, Hux found it disturbing, as if the whole world were gathered in wait behind the trees, waiting for him to get within range to spring at him. The whole world, or perhaps a more sinister threat. He chased away the thought that something of Snoke remained among the murmuring trees. After all, the King had never left the fortress, not in the thirty years since he had first arrived in the region and claimed it for himself.

Soldiers would pass through the forest on their way to battle, and make haste upon their return, lest they should lose to the dark woods what they had managed to safeguard during the war – their life, their spirit, their will perhaps. Villagers would confine themselves to the fringe of the woods, gathering kindling or penning their livestock at the very edge of the first row of the trees.

The night preceding the coup, Hux and the other generals had elected to station most of their troops within the woods, the better to launch an attack against the fortress in the morning. It had been Ren’s idea.

‘Won’t he... feel us?’ one of the captains had asked, voicing what most of the higher officers thought but had not dared say out loud. By that point, most of Hux’s co-conspirators had ceased using Snoke’s name, as if the very mention of it might somehow alert the King to their ploy.

Ren had turned towards the captain, and though his helmet hid most of his face, it did not mask the downward curl of his lips. ‘His Supreme Majesty...’ Ren visibly checked himself and began again, his voice harsh: ‘Snoke doesn’t own the forest. He relies upon it, but the strength of these woods extends far beyond his purview.’ Suddenly Hux had heard something, not within the surrounding woods but inside his own mind, a whisper as loud as a scream that sent his mind reeling. _Unfettered power. Yours for the taking?_ The words were still ringing in his head as he turned back towards Ren. The knight’s expression hadn't changed, and his sneer, directed at a captain who was certainly older and more experienced in battle than he was, had chased the cryptic question from Hux’s mind. As often when Ren was present, fear was replaced with profound irritation.

Until the moment Ren had sworn to serve him, Hux had been content with viewing the knight as a self-centred, annoying child, useful in battle but to be handled with an iron grip. Mentions of Ren generally brought to his mind the knight’s wide, insolent mouth, the lower half of a perpetual scowl visible above the folds of a tattered black cowl.

As he delved deeper into the woods, the trees closing ranks around him, Hux wondered if Ren had lied to them, if only by bending the truth to his words. Maybe the forest didn't belong to Snoke, but Hux thought he could feel the King’s presence around him like the first drops of rain before a downpour, a gathering certainty that impelled him to throw swift looks over his shoulder with every few steps, wondering whether the threat he feared was behind him or hiding in the darkness ahead.

Despite his uneasiness, he knew he was headed in the right direction. It was an unexplainable feeling. He sensed it on his tongue and upon his lips, a vicious sting like the residual burn that follows a bite of scalding food. Whenever he strayed off-course, the pain would recede, and it often took him a moment to seek the burning sensation once more, with the renewed conviction that this was the path that he'd been meant to follow – that he was headed towards an objective, and not turning his back to his lifelong goals. And so he focused on the crunch of his footsteps on the white undergrowth, one arm shoving branches aside as he blinked the snow away from his eyes.

‘Why him?’ Hux had asked Phasma, as they stood at the edge of a small village far from the fortress, waiting beneath the creaking sign of a ramshackle inn. ‘I thought he was Snoke’s favourite.’

There was no lingering jealousy in that comment, and Hux knew he was not alone in finding Snoke’s relationship to his knights somewhat repellent. He wondered if that was what had finally sent Ren running, the King’s suffocating mixture of paternal approval and sickening sadism, dealt in turn with the same amount of obvious delight.

‘You can only sharpen a sword for so long before the blade withers away to nothing’, Phasma had replied, eventually. ‘The King can afford to replace the sword, the sword cannot afford to be replaced.’

‘Fair enough’, Hux had shrugged, rearranging the folds of his cape to try and ward off the wind, Ren’s lateness to the meeting stocking up the pent-up resentment of several years of disagreements. Hux would not view the knight with pity. There was no pitying a man who'd dug his own grave and was now scrabbling in vain to get out of it. Hux should have known, having dug his own with his father’s help, some twenty years before.

When Snoke ascended the throne, Hux was six years old. He had few memories of that time, but he did remember the day his father brought him before the King to see whether his son might prove suitable material for Snoke’s personal guard. Hux’s father had been as harsh and straightforward as he was brutal, the archetype of a military man. The former General Hux would have been hard-pressed to agree with the spiritual code of conduct Snoke imposed upon his knights. Yet, he would have done whatever it took for his son to follow in his glorious footsteps. At six years old, Hux had been as slender as he would be at thirty, but he had not yet the advantage of height to compensate for his slightness of build. His father, whose thick neck and heavy waist threw further shade upon his fledging progeny, had decided that he would rather offer his son to Snoke’s martial cult rather than run the risk of seeing him grow into a second-rate soldier.

Snoke had motioned for Hux to come closer and he could recall the moment he had taken the first step towards the dais, with the weight of his father at his back and Snoke’s reptile stare riveted to his reddened face. Hux had had to walk the whole way up to the throne on tottering legs, biting his lip so hard he drew blood. It occurred to him in hindsight that Snoke had known from the start what his answer would be – that he had submitted Hux to this whole ordeal for the pleasure of watching him squirm.

‘I thank you for your gift, General Hux’, Snoke had said, waving a lazy hand above the armrest of his throne. ‘But I have no use for it. Make a beast of that son of yours, General. And perhaps we will find a use for him.’

‘Lord Ren’ – a reluctant salute, which Hux had delivered as he joined the knight outside one of the armed camps, on the night before the assault.

They'd been close enough to the edge of the forest that the light could penetrate the first row of trees along with the fluttering snow. The highest towers of the fortress had been visible in the distance, beyond the edge of the hilled terrain that bordered the woods. It'd been a starless night, the moon barely visible among the clouds. As a consequence, the light seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, basking the trees in silver, making it near impossible to look straight at the white glare of the snow.

‘General’, Ren had answered, in that same quiet voice, but Hux noticed with a start that the knight had removed his helmet. And if his first thought had been that Ren’s face was not much to look at, dark eyes and a strong nose and a tangle of black hair that merged with the frayed cowl at his neck, there'd been something about the man’s expression that had given him pause. Without the helmet he hadn't seemed as proud or as conceited – indeed, he'd looked somewhat sheepish. He'd hovered at the edge of the trees, gloved fingers tapping against the surface of the helmet in his arms.

‘What is this about?’ Hux had asked, taking an emboldened step forward, dusting snow off the fur collar of his cape. ‘Doubts, on the eve of battle? I would have thought you were past that.’

‘I am’, Ren had said, with enough bite that Hux knew he had touched a nerve. ‘But I have been thinking about what he said. Your soldier, the captain. About the forest. Maybe he was right. We do not want His Supreme... We do not want Snoke using these woods against us.’

Hux had taken a second to consider the fact that he now formed a collective with the King’s sullen knight, and another to piece together the disjointed fragments of Ren’s speech.

‘What do you suggest?’ he'd asked. He had instinctively turned his back to the field, keeping a cautious eye on the firs. With the slight wind that rushed through their branches, it'd been deceptively easy to project a configuration of thoughts and feelings upon the waiting trees.

‘If I swore allegiance to you’, Ren had said. ‘The way I did to Snoke. Then, maybe...’

Hux's surprise had gone unnoticed. Ren had kept staring into the distance, in the direction of the fortress, as if he were having this conversation with himself. Hux had felt something bordering on elation at the idea of Ren swearing obedience to him. He could recall one too many occasions on which the knight had shouldered past him, on the field or in a corridor of the castle, without so much as a sideways glance through the narrow slit of that unnerving helmet.

‘Go ahead, then’, he'd snapped, congratulating himself for his sharpness of tone.

Ren had gazed at him with a look Hux could only have described as conflicted, and with a swift tug he'd unsheathed his sword and thrown it at Hux’s feet, with enough force that Hux had had to jump back to avoid the clattering blade.

‘Watch it!'

Ren had not reacted to his outrage. Dropping his helmet in the snow, he'd taken a few steps and sunk to his knees, his posture dissolving with a sigh of resignation. He'd yanked off a glove with his teeth. Hux had watched in silence as Ren held his thumb to the edge of the sword’s blade, staining the snow with a few shiny drops of blood. He could have sworn the knight then shuddered the terms of an oath through clenched teeth, but he hadn't heard any distinct words, and for a moment they'd remained as they were, with Hux standing, facing the forest and staring down at Ren’s large shoulders and at his bowed head, at his dark hair speckled with snow. At length the knight had risen, in a smooth unfurling of long dark limbs, and before Hux could evade him, Ren had pressed his bleeding thumb to his cold lips.

‘Swallow’, he'd said, the order low and spoken far too close to Hux’s lips for comfort. Hux had licked at the blood reflexively, tasting metal and snow and the lingering scent of Ren’s leather gloves. He'd felt the blood well up again and he'd tracked a drop down Ren’s finger, teeth grazing against his scarred palm. He'd felt airy-headed, and he'd noticed with a start that he had gripped the knight’s wrist, and that his hands were shaking.

‘That should do it’, Ren had said, and Hux had made the mistake of finding his eyes. A single thought sprung up, unbidden, to his mind. _We might as well have set the whole forest on fire._

A day later, and the words still rang true. And beneath the unease he felt at having bared himself to Ren – for that was how he had interpreted that oath, as something given rather than something received, with his trembling hands and his mouth so reluctant to part from Ren’s skin –, he could not shake the thought that Ren had set into motion something that neither of them could fully understand.

After an endless traipse through the dark, soggy woods, Hux finally came to a clearing. He forced his way through a wall of shivering branches, and the forest opened up before him, a wide-enough void that he could suddenly take great gulps of fresh night air. Before he had fully assessed his surroundings, he caught sight of a dark shape in the middle of the clearing, collapsed upon the snow. He took a few hurried steps but stayed clear from the fallen figure, recalling the dead knights in the throne room.

Some time before he had reached the room, a soldier had leaned too close to one of the bodies, fingers stretching towards the ornate jewel clasping the knight’s cape. The knight’s hand had shot up, closing around the soldier’s throat and squeezing until the man’s face was black and blue. Hux had sidestepped the soldier’s corpse on his way to the throne, and the memory of it still sat uncomfortably at the back of his mind, a vivid vision of deformed features, of a swollen tongue protruding between clenched teeth. Hux had learned that lesson early on – beware of slumbering monsters, a dream could send them at your throat.

Oddly, he had never associated the saying with these ghostly woods. There had been far too many slumbering monsters in the military. Until this day, there had been one on the kingdom’s throne. And if he were to face the facts, Hux would have to admit that more often than not, he was one of these monsters himself.

Ren was lying on his side, one hand clasping his flank, his face hidden by the long locks of his dark hair. Hux could see a spray of blood on the snow near his head. The frozen ground around Ren was littered with broken branches and tree stumps, now mostly covered in snow. Had he arrived a few hours earlier, Hux would have found another stretch of dense woods. Ren’s blade had sliced cleanly through the trunks, and it was easy to picture him waving his sword around, with the great twirling motions Hux had seen him practice in the courtyard of the fortress. His eyes fell upon the sword. It lay at some distance from Ren’s hand. For some reason the falling snow had spared the blade, and it shone red in the twilight glow, thoroughly coated in blood.

The burning sensation had disappeared from the tip of his tongue, and Hux reached without thinking for the stained snow at Ren’s back, smearing some across his glove. He stopped short of bringing his fingers to his lips, staring at his hand in dismay.

‘Witchery’, he muttered, and wiped his hand clean on the knight’s unmoving shoulder. He felt Ren stir. Rocking back on his heels, Hux gave him enough space to roll onto his back. Ren slowly reached up to brush his hair away from his face. There was a long, bleeding gash running diagonally from his forehead to his jaw.

‘Did the forest strike back after you cut down those trees?’ Hux asked. It unnerved him that he had not been able to swallow back a sigh of relief when he'd seen Ren move.

‘No’, Ren said. ‘It was a girl. A girl I had caught for Snoke.’ He sounded like his usual self, surly and self-pitying. Hux snorted.

‘A girl’, he repeated, a hint of a smile tugging at his lips. ‘You took down Snoke’s elite order of knights by yourself, twelve of them, and you were bested by a girl?’

‘She was strong’, Ren said, a half-protest. ‘And the woods were on her side’, he added, which was just the kind of absurd statement Hux had grown to expect from one of Snoke’s mystical puppets. He chose to interpret the statement as Ren having run headfirst into a tree.

‘Come on’, he sighed. ‘Pull yourself together. I have a kingdom to rule. Lands to conquer.’ Something stirred deep within him, a spark kindling a dormant fire. Somewhere beyond this forest, there were mountains to reclaim, a world to lay fallow, and an empire to build from the smoking ruins of Snoke’s reign.

Ren dragged himself into a sitting position, one hand clutching at his side. Hux got a better look at the opening between the front and back of Ren’s armour. The edge of the breastplate was dented, and Ren’s fingers curled around the tattered, bloody mess of his tunic and mail. Hux revised his former assessment of the knight’s wounds, but resolved not to let any of his concern transpire. The faster they returned to the fortress, the sooner Ren’s wounds could be dealt with.

Ren reached for the sword, and he used the blade to bring himself to his feet, pressing down upon the pommel until he was finally standing on both legs. Hux took a step forward and shoved himself under the man’s shoulder, taking care to avoid his wounded side. Ren let out a grunt but did not otherwise comment. Once they had found their balance, the both of them set off towards the edge of the clearing, Ren leaning heavily upon Hux. Hux felt the combined weight of muscle and armour driving him into the ground, his feet sinking in the snow. Ren dragged the sword along, the blood upon it glinting as if it had only just been shed.

Speech was something of an ordeal at this point, but there was a question burning Hux’s lips, and he did not care to wait until Ren had passed out to obtain an answer.

‘Why me?’ he asked. ‘There were four of us generals. Why did you choose me?’

With the branches whipping his face and the snow that kept tumbling from the firs into their eyes and mouths, it was a wonder he heard Ren’s answer at all, and yet the words travelled to him.

_Because any other would have abandoned me._

Hux would have met Ren’s eyes then, but there was little in the way of light, and besides, Ren had subsided against his side, face burrowed against his neck. Hux inhaled a mouthful of damp black hair each time he tried to draw breath. He gave up on his attempts at conversation, reasserted his grip on Ren’s armguard, and walked on.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘I don’t fear your spells and curses’, Hux said, with a stiff little shrug that was far more like his usual self than his lazy sprawl on the high-backed throne. ‘I don’t fear you.’

Rumour had it, along the northern shores, that the Emperor had a dog by his side, a mastiff the size of a bear. They said it prowled around his room at night.

In the eastern plains, below the white-capped peaks and in the small dwellings around the frozen lakes, the word was that the Emperor had a tame wolf sitting at the foot of his throne. They said that the beast whimpered in its sleep, that its muzzle rested snuggly against the front of the Emperor's polished boots.

More sinister stories coursed through the inns and taverns of the dry South. Men and women stood on rickety porches, in the glare of the sun, and claimed that the Emperor had a monster in his bed. They said a servant had seen it with her own two eyes, rising from the covers in the dark of night, with pale yellow eyes and thick black clumps that were neither blood nor water dripping from its shaggy mane. It was a story told to disobedient children, and those same children acted it out by day, wielding sticks to ward off the beast, pulling at the moss in the trees by the river until the branches were bare and the battle was won – for its power lay in its hair, they knew.

There was talk in the western mountains of the Emperor's prized weapon, but the windy passes did not carry forth any tales of tamed beasts. In the high reaches, the Emperor's opponents spoke of a bleeding sword. And they spoke of a tall knight, an angry shadow who wielded the sword one-handed, never missing his mark.

They would have tumbled off the cliff were it not for the pain in his hand.

Kylo awoke with a jolt, reflexively pulling on the reins, and the horse came to a lazy halt, seeming as it often did to walk through water, even though it trod on stable ground. Kylo was known to be prone to fits of anger, but he could never muster the energy to be angry at the horse. It seemed a small miracle that the horse-keeper at the fortress had found a beast that would bear him. Horses baulked if he came near. They snorted and foamed at the mouth, eyes wild. Most animals did.

It was the horse-keeper who had named the mount. Firebrand, since according to the man, the horse was ‘a feisty little troublemaker’. In the two years since he had been given the beast, Kylo had found it to be placid, with a heavy tread. He had once seen a crow settle atop Firebrand’s head without the horse doing so much as huffing. Kylo had had to knock the bird off with a backhanded blow.

It was unsurprising, then, that Firebrand would have failed to notice the cliff ahead, or rather, that it would not have cared enough to deviate from its path. Kylo went to rub his eyes with both hands, and was reminded of what had woken him up – the dull, persistent throbbing in his right hand, as if his pulse had relocated somewhere between his thumb and forefinger. He rubbed the spot through his glove, absent-mindedly. He had grown somewhat accustomed to the pain in the last few weeks, although he could have sworn it receded during his sleep, the better to assault him when he regained consciousness. The exhausting, cumbersome cough had subsided, however. It had kept him awake almost every night since he had left the fortress, forcing him to sit upright for hours on end, hunched over and heaving in between bouts that stained his covers with blood. The coughing had seemed to die down as he drew nearer to the castle.

From the top of the cliff, he could see the long stretch of fields that led to the bustling town at the foot of the fortress. His eyes barely glided over the heavy stone towers before they settled on the dark green spread of the pines to the northwest. He had felt the forest growing closer with each passing day. Now that he stood in view of the woods, he relished what felt like a sharpening of his senses. As if a load had been lifted from his shoulders, he found himself compelled to take a few shuddering breaths of the late summer air.

He was about to spur his mount and begin the detour that would take him back to the valley, when something caught his attention. At first it was little more than a distant rumble, somewhere in the east, where the morning mists had not yet cleared. The clamour grew until he could make out the sound of voices chanting, accompanied by the din of horses’ hooves and the rattle of wheels dislodging pebbles along the main road.

Kylo spared little time observing the returning army. He took advantage of his raised viewpoint to look past the vanguard and the standard-bearers, past the foot soldiers and towards the mounted troops. He barely noticed the way the mist seemed to lift before his eyes, uncovering the familiar silhouette of General Phasma. One hardly needed keen eyes to make out her striking figure, towering a head above the rest of the cavalry. Her armour glinted in the hazy morning light. Having found Phasma, it was only a matter of shifting his eyes to her side, where he could glimpse a slender silhouette riding a pale horse.

_Hux,_ he thought, the title an afterthought. The Emperor and his army were marching home.

He felt himself lean closer, as if this might sharpen his vision, and before he knew it, he had covered the distance – a stray thought carried on a gust of wind – until he could feel the bones of Hux’s horse shifting between his legs, the reins slack between Hux’s hands. The Emperor’s shoulders were slumped, his bearded chin dipping into his collar. The renewal of strength Kylo had drawn from his proximity to the forest seemed to dissolve, smothered by the brunt of Hux’s exhaustion. For a dizzying moment, he thought he could really touch Hux – his hand settled against Hux’s concave stomach, his thumb brushing against jutting ribs. He did not dwell on the strangeness of the sensation, but focused on the Emperor’s hunched back, and _pushed._

Hux straightened up instantly, his pale green eyes widening in shock, and Kylo heard the thought as clearly as if it had been spoken. _This is no ordinary wind._

Kylo started, flexing his fingers instinctively upon the reins of his horse. It felt like another awakening. But the green plain still stretched out before him, shot through with the grey line of the road, where the imperial army trudged on on its way to the fortress. Kylo blinked against the sun, vainly trying to make sense of what had happened.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that killing the one person who could have answered his questions might have been something of an oversight.

He had put the helmet back on by the time he reached the drawbridge. It was a familiar weight by now, although he would never forget the first few nights Snoke had forced them to sleep wearing the bulky things. Kylo had struggled awake convinced that he had been buried inside the forest, not so far under that he could not hear feet trampling over his earthly grave. Roots seemed to coil around his head, pushing him further down. Reaching up, he had found the cool metal of the helmet atop his brow.

He had been lucky. On the second night, after a strenuous day of training outside the fortress, one of Snoke's apprentices had tossed and turned for hours until he finally fell asleep, his face pressed to the ground. He had died suffocating inside his helmet with none of them the wiser. Kylo couldn't even remember his name. After all, that had been the whole point of that ordeal - to mask whatever personality traits they possessed, beyond the ones given them by Snoke.

The imperial army was stationed in town and in several encampments below the walls of the fortress. The soldiers who were not using the washhouse as public baths had made their way to the river or to the alehouses. The stale smell of sweat, grime and ale followed Kylo far inside the fortress. Hux’s army seemed intent on celebrating its victory, but it was blatant that the festivities would not last long. In a few hours most of the soldiers would lay sprawled and snoring, be it in the inns of the town or on the staircases and in the courtyards of the fortress.

Not all soldiers had deserted their post. When he walked through the carved oak doors of the throne room, Phasma was standing in front of one of the tall windows, looking out towards the forest. Her helmet lay at her elbow, tucked against the window frame. Someone had finally succeeded in dealing her a blow to the head, which given her height was no small feat. It must have been a tremendous hit - one side of the helm had caved in, and even with her back to him, Kylo could see the wound on the side of her head, dark red against the short wheat-blond strands of her hair.

'I would not let that fester, if I were you.'

He regretted the words the moment they had been spoken. He did not interact often or willingly with imperial soldiers. Truth be told, he did not interact often with anyone. While the King lived, Snoke had kept him carefully isolated, including from his fellow knights. He had remained isolated after Snoke's death. Should he have chosen a confidant, it would not have been Phasma. He had warned Hux against making her a general. It seemed like a foolhardy decision - to promote a clever officer with a penchant for military take-overs to the rank Hux himself had held before he staged his own take-over.

His misgivings did make it tempting, at times, to provoke her.

_It is a superficial wound._ The thought was clear enough that he knew she had meant for him to hear it. She turned towards him.

'A knight would have proven useful on the eastern front', she said, her voice echoing through the empty room.

It was deceptively easy to lift the cues from the surface of her thoughts. He felt the strong heavy glow of anger, overlaid with a brittle coat of resentment, shot through with burning streaks of distrust. In this, then, they were alike.

'I was following orders from his Highness the Emperor', he said, careful to keep his voice even and his misgivings within the confines of the helm. 'He did not wish me to take part in this battle. It appears you did well without me.'

'They do not like you in the East, Lord Ren', Phasma remarked. She did not mean it as a gibe. It took him a moment longer to identify it for what it was - a grudging compliment. 'It is a fear we could have used to our advantage.'

And beneath this, a thought she barely tried to conceal - _We lost many._

‘Some have questioned your usefulness, my Lord’, she said. ‘This is to be the rule of men, they say.’

‘Am I not a man?’ Kylo asked. ‘Was the King not a man?’ He resented the curiosity in his tone. He could not help his eyes from shifting to the throne. He remembered the sword snagging against Snoke’s chest, as if it had found stone rather than flesh – and the way Snoke’s hard glare had turned to surprise and disgust when the blade finally sank in.

‘Are you?’ Phasma asked, or wondered. Her eyes came to rest upon his clenched right hand, and he forced his fingers to unwind despite the resilient ache behind his thumb. Phasma cast him what he hoped wasn't a knowing look. Suddenly those thoughts of hers that were within his reach had become dull and nebulous. She turned back towards the window. ‘Whatever you are’, she said. ‘You belong to the woods, and the rule of the forest had ended.’ A warning. _We will no longer be confounded by your whispering trees._

‘He needs me’, Kylo said.

It was no longer Snoke he envisioned upon the throne but Hux, Hux as he had seen him hours before on the main road, striped of his armour, his boots covered in mud and his red hair a snarl. There had been a single thought going through the Emperor’s head, over and over and over again. _This is what I wanted, a war, an empire; this is what I want. This is what I wanted, this is still what I want._

‘He certainly believes so’, Phasma observed. ‘Yet, someday, he will realize he does not need you to inspire fear in the hearts of his people.’

She gestured pointedly towards the tapestry that had recently been hung up on one side of the room. It represented the Empire’s latest campaign in the west. Kylo had stared at the piece of fabric often enough during audiences that he did not feel the need to observe it now. It was a gaudy piece that depicted a triumphant Hux haranguing his troops. In the background, a mountain was collapsing upon itself, devoured by fire.

Kylo had been deep in the woods when the battle had taken place, and yet he had still seen the fire. It had coloured the entire sky. For hours on end he had run through the woods, frantic, overridden by a rampant terror, convinced that the forest was burning. There had been something he wished to protect, further out on the western edge of the woods – something valuable and fragile, which he had only just remembered existed.

He had stumbled to a halt at the edge of the forest. He had realized then that the fire was not within the woods. Hux had brought down the mountain itself, and a great gash had opened within the distant range, through which poured forth wave upon wave of thick roiling smoke.

Wishing to end his conversation with Phasma, Kylo swiveled round and made to exit the room. The effect of his billowing cape was somewhat lessened by the fact that he had to pull open the door on his way out.

He remained unconcerned by Phasma’s warnings. She would only become a threat if she decided to seize Hux’s power for herself.

Besides, she was entirely misguided if she believed she understood the Emperor better than his knight.

Kylo had felt it tremble on the wind that night, at the edge of the woods. It had travelled miles from the foothills of the burning mountain – a feeble echo of Hux’s shrill enthusiasm.

_Can you see it? Can you see it, Ren?_

Finding Hux within the fortress was easy, a matter of following the sharp burn on the inside of his thumb, where he had once cut his finger to bind himself to Hux. Most of the time, Kylo didn't notice it, unless he was specifically looking for Hux, and at times, when Hux drew near, he received a particularly nasty jab, a reminder. It was not the pounding ache he felt in his other hand, hidden beneath the glove at all times, a harrowing source of worry he tried to ignore. It was not as irritating as the scarred tissue across his face had been, back when the wounds he had received in the forest were still healing.

He realized, slightly surprised, that at some point in time, the smarting link that tied him to Hux had stopped feeling like a wound at all.

It was only when Snoke died that his subjects realized that the King had lived in the castle. To most of the inhabitants of the fortress, Snoke was so deeply rooted inside the throne room that they did not even consider the possibility of him having kept a room, let alone a bed, within the castle walls.

Yet Snoke had had his own chambers, situated in the oldest building in the fortress, a quadrangle of mossy, disjointed stones. It stood in the shadow of the towers and walkways that had been built during Snoke’s reign. Snoke’s rooms did not let in the sun, but opened onto a dank, narrow courtyard. Though he had undoubtedly occupied the chambers, there was no bed to be found – only a tall-backed chair of some old, varnished wood, with a single, tattered blanket thrown across the seat. The rooms were permeated with a sour, earthly smell. It had reminded Kylo of his first battlefield, when it had rained throughout the fight. The bodies of foes and allies alike had sunk into the mossy ground; the streams had tasted of blood and muck.

Hux had taken one look at the king’s rooms, sniffed in disgust, and stalked off to find more appropriate lodgings. He'd repurposed the windy upper rooms of the eastern tower. The ceilings were low enough that a person of Hux or Kylo’s height would inevitably knock themselves against the rafters, and the stones slabs brought down the temperature in spite of the thick carpets. The rooms were as poorly designed as any other area of the fortress – Snoke had not cared much for comfort. Hux’s stark personality meant that few changes were made to the main room – a working fireplace, rugs and wall hangings, a desk, a chair. A narrow bed where he slept on his side, with a white-knuckled grip on his cushions.

This, Kylo had found out in the first few weeks after Snoke’s death. Hux would not remain alone, and at night he stared suspiciously at the contorted shadows in the corners of his room, as if he thought Snoke’s ghost might attack him. Or perhaps what he had feared were human shadows, dagger-wielding foes emboldened by the King’s death, believing now that any man might be killed, even a king – even an emperor.

So Kylo had taken to keeping vigil in the new emperor’s room, listening to the wind, watching the pitch-black wall of darkness masking the sea.

He'd listened to Hux dream.

‘There you are.’ As often, Hux’s tone was imperious. His hair and skin and even his eyes were paler than usual. The only colour in his face came from the streaks of mud across his cheeks.

‘Your Highness.’ Kylo would not have admitted to it, but he had learned to emulate Phasma’s inflexion when she delivered the title – her practised blend of courtesy and self-confidence. Besides, once the words had been spoken, Kylo usually did away with the title, in part because he knew it would irritate Hux. ‘Have you lost your armour?’ he asked.

Hux frowned. ‘It wore me down’, he said. ‘It wore the horse down.’

Hux stood in front of a tapestry that had once been meant for the throne room. He had refused it, preferring a more pompous account of his deeds. For some reason, he had kept the version that had displeased him. It represented the army’s return after the campaign in the west, a pathetic traipse through the hostile woods. The Hux in the tapestry was walking knee-deep in swamp water, surrounded by tall, spindly trees. His horse had tumbled down a moraine weeks before the army had made it to the woods.

It struck Kylo that in the eight months since Snoke’s death, during which Hux had led one successful campaign after the other, the Emperor had always returned in a similar state. There was something of the wraith in him, a haunted look about his eyes that his angry, snappish voice could not entirely conceal.

‘You must eat’, he said, the words leaving his lips before he had quite thought them through. ‘Have one of your servants prepare a bath.’

Hux blinked and rubbed his mouth with a gritty hand. ‘I know your face’, he said. ‘Take that helmet off. Tell me what you found.’

Kylo hesitated before taking off the helmet. Hux noticed, exhausted as he was – a thought as swift as an arrow shooting from his mind to Kylo’s. _What are you hoping to hide. I can read your mouth as well as your eyes._

He set the helmet down carefully on Hux’s desk.

‘I dealt with it’, he said. ‘The obstacle that prevented your progress in the south.’

‘What was it?’

‘Does it matter?’ Kylo asked. He thought back to the barren plain, to the hole in the ground and to the thing that had quivered at the bottom of it. It was a sight he would readily have scraped from his eyes. He was momentarily glad that Hux could not access his thoughts. ‘Take your troops south if you will’, he said. ‘The disease is gone. They will be able to cross the border to whatever land you wish to conquer. Although why you crave these empty steppes is beyond me.’

‘The land was cursed, wasn’t it?’ Hux said, warily. ‘Those clans that live beyond the border cursed the land, to bar Snoke from their territory.’

‘Snoke did not care about their territory’, Kylo snapped, annoyed. ‘He had all the land he desired. Why would he have wanted the south?’

He did not voice the thought that had been nagging at him during the return journey – namely, that the bloody, living curse he had found buried in the ground had been Snoke’s work, meant to keep the southern clans from entering his kingdom.

Kylo strongly suspected Snoke had come to the fortress like a sick beast drags itself to a remote corner to die, its body poisoning the water it collapses into. And with each passing day, as he rode to the ends of the kingdom on Hux’s orders, he thought he came to understand Snoke’s obsession with this dark green valley.

‘It eludes me’, Hux confessed. ‘This talk of cursed soil. My soldiers were covered in sores and dying by the dozen, in a land where nothing grows, not even these malevolent trees you love so much. I cannot understand it.’

‘Does it matter?’ Kylo repeated, in part to mask the fact that he did not understand it himself, not all of it, not yet. ‘This is why you wanted a knight on your side, wasn’t it?’

Hux’s aggravated expression made it clear he did not intend to take this conversation any further, and Kylo was about to leave, when he caught the words on the tip of Hux’s tongue, unspoken yet glaringly loud in the sparseness of his well-ordered mind.

_I dreamt of your hands._ Kylo could even hear the accompanying tone, prickly and resentful. He jerked away from Hux’s mind, eyes wide, his hand thoughtlessly reaching for the helmet.

‘Is this a side effect of this blood oath?’ Hux asked, conversationally. Beneath the dirt and the dishevelled hair, his pale eyes had regained some of their usual tartness.

‘I should hope so’, Kylo said, latching onto the helmet with both hands, and slamming it down hard enough that the iron guard bruised the bridge of his prominent nose.

The helmet hid him from Hux as he made his retreat, but it did nothing to shield him from his mocking thoughts.

He felt it as he crossed the square courtyard where he had once trained with his fellow knights. A jagged point, scraping against the inside of his glove, caught between the leather and his skin. The pain in his hand had not varied in its intensity, and remained a mind-numbing presence in the back of his head.

It felt like a malicious echo of earlier times – of the night he had led the young trainees in the forest, of the moment his father had fallen, without a sound, to the moss covered ground. Of the fight in the woods, and the broken edge of Rey’s wooden staff slashing his face.

He rubbed the spot behind his thumb. It looked as if a web had spread beneath the leather, veins or vines. He would prune it. He would cauterize the wound.

It would grow back.

As soon as the scar across his face and the wound in his side had healed – and maybe even before that, as soon as he had been able to walk – Kylo had headed towards the forest.

He wanted to cross the woods from the east to the west, from the fortress to the foothills of the foggy mountains that neither Snoke nor Hux had ever bothered to claim.

At the foot of the mountains, there was a small lake, just outside the woods and below the start of another forest – this one fir and oak and the stark lines of white birch trunks. Every year, a large group of vagrants came to the glade. There were a few settlements in a valley halfway down the other side of the mountains, and the itinerant craftsmen would set up camp by the lake, hike up to a windy pass between two mountains, and sell their wares in the villages.

Kylo had walked to the travellers’ campsite three times in his life.

The first time, he had arrived from the west, leading an eager group of knights in training to a sinister fate at the heart of the woods.

The second time, he had been running away from the woods, his clothing torn by the constant lashing of the rustling branches. And yet, he could not run as fast as he would have wanted, for he dragged a small girl by the hand. Every few steps, Rey’s foot would snag against a root, and Ben would lift her up and resume running, not daring to take her in his arms, lest a tree should snatch her from him.

He had hoisted Rey up into an empty cart at the edge of the camp. He had re-entered the woods, and never looked back.

The third time Kylo sought out the campsite, there was a fresh scar across his face, and he knew even before the camp was in sight that Rey would be long gone. She had joined the rebels on the western front, where the mountains were not worn green mounts but harsh jagged peaks, windswept and inhospitable, liable to crumble at any moment since Hux had blown a hole in their midst.

Kylo knew Rey was gone, but he lingered at the fringe of the forest, watching the wayfarers drifting in and out of camp, listening to their calls, to the ringing bells of their cattle and to the shrill cries of children playing by the lake.

A whisper carried along the wind, reproachful but drowsy, as if it had escaped Rey’s mind as she turned over in her sleep.

_This was not an easy life. These were not kind people._

He visited Firebrand in the stables before he left the castle. It had been unexpected, this sudden need to make sure the horse was provided for. Stroking Firebrand’s grey mane with a gloved hand, he forced himself to stay a moment longer, listening to the horse’s companionable huffs. The stables were filled with shadowy beasts that he could barely glimpse in the encroaching darkness.

During his first days at the fortress, he had hidden at the back of one of these stalls. The animals did not fear him then. At the time, he had been a frightened animal himself.

He received a command from Hux, relayed by a spindly soldier who quavered in his boots, his eyes repeatedly darting towards Kylo’s scabbard. The Emperor had summoned a council meeting. He requested Kylo’s attendance.

Kylo had sat through enough of these meetings to know how this one would play out. Hux would gather his advisors. New generals, such as Phasma. Generals who had survived the coup, and Hux’s subsequent take-over. Various officers. An assortment of noblemen forming what Hux refused to call a court. The advisors would try to intervene; Hux would expose some brand new battle plan. There would be talk of funding and taxes. Hux would gesture towards Kylo. His role was invariably to scare those who did not agree with the Emperor. If he had not been lulled to sleep by the constant droning, Kylo would comply.

‘Tell the Emperor I have better things to do’, he said to the messenger.

As he walked away, he could tell the soldier had remained rooted to the spot, reluctant to pursue Kylo further, or to report his failure to Hux.

In a childish gesture of spite, Kylo whipped a hand through the air, smirking in satisfaction when he heard the boy topple down.

The sleeping bodies of drunk soldiers littered the winding road that led from the fortress to the village. Kylo could see more of them in the ditches by the road, snoring softly against the grass. There was slightly more animation in the town. He did not linger, and gave the boisterous groups of revellers a wide berth. He had disliked this town when it was still a village. It had quadrupled in size since Hux had taken power, and since the Emperor had been occupied with his dreams of conquest, the town had sprawled unsupervised, dirty and dank, with its gambling dens and its cutthroats.

Kylo let the rumour and the stench of the town pass him by. Behind it, barely audible but present nonetheless, he could hear the murmur of the trees. It was unlikely that they would have made their peace with him. They might still let him pass, if they sensed what he had set out to achieve.

A part of him knew that one day, the trees would get their revenge. He found himself hoping they would let him live a while longer, long enough to return to Hux one more time.

_I have dreamt of you as well. The trees bended low over me, there was little left in that clearing but the rising dark. The cold of the snow. And then your anger burnt through the trees. You made a path out of the woods._ He let the thoughts take shape in his mind, but he kept a firm hold of them, and did not let them drift back towards the fortress.

Kylo had lost his father’s heart to the forest.

He had believed, at the time, that the whisper in his ear came from the trees, that the trees had urged him to kill Han.

In the end, it had only been Snoke.

Perhaps it did not make much of a difference.

It was a sacrifice asked of all the knights in Snoke’s order. A heart given to the forest, buried on the darkest night of the year, in the red-veined ground in the heart of the woods. Snoke promised power and the shelter of darkness, a life free of weakness and misgivings.

The moment his sword had struck Han, Kylo had known the trees would not abide by it. The rustle at his back had grown into a clamour. The red sword had slipped from his fingers. He had felt the flutter of pine needles at his back, a soft caress, and then the pliant needles had sharpened and he knew if he did not take his sword to the tree, the needles would pierce through his armour, like roots digging through fresh soil.

He had been confused, at first. People spoke of the haunted forest, villagers whispered about the cursed trees. If the trees did not obey Snoke, then Snoke had lied. The King did not draw his power from the woods.

It was nothing more than a stray thought, but it buried itself inside Kylo’s head, and in the years that followed, he could not discard it, no matter how hard he tried to follow the path he had set himself, no matter how often he cut the shoots growing out of his hand.

The trees let him through. The forest was eerily silent, and the path lay clear ahead of him. It felt like cheating, somehow. If this was to be his penance, it made little sense that the woods should facilitate his progress. But the trees stood still. Every so often the weight of their awareness threatened to topple him down.

He would have known the way even if the forest had stood against him. He had buried Han in that forsaken glade, and he could still sense the displacement of the earth, the blood of thirteen hearts seeping like poison into the ground, corrupting the roots of the surrounding trees, and the rampant life of the undergrowth. They had not all been fathers, he knew. Snoke had wanted the strength of ties stronger than the blood oath he shared with his knights. Fathers, siblings, lovers and companions. One knight’s infant daughter.

In the clearing miles away, where Rey had fought back against him, she had slipped on the mossy ground, and for a fraction of a second, her whole body had seized, as if he had used his powers to immobilize her.

‘I can feel their bones under my feet’, she had whispered. She'd sounded, briefly, like the stunned five-year old child he had left at the edge of a campsite. That child had only remained still long enough for him to take a few steps, before she had started bawling his name, over and over. In the clearing, some twenty years later, she came back at him with the same fury, striking blow after blow, aiming for his heart, for his deceitful face. _What have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?_

The glade was as dark as he remembered, a wide circle surrounded by strangely solemn trees. Contrary to most of the trees in these woods, the firs around the glade seemed to curve over the ground, as if in worship. Yet Kylo could sense that this was not the case. He felt pressure along the trunks of the trees, like a hand on a spine, pushing them forwards, forcing their submission. The treetops met at the centre of the glade, and masked the sky.

He pictured Snoke hobbling into the glade, his pale shifty eyes fixated on the knobbly ground. Kylo knew what had brought him there.

In the wake of Hux’s failed campaign in the south, when a third of his troops had fallen prey to the mysterious illness, one of the remaining soldiers had approached the Emperor. An old man, who had somehow survived not only Snoke but also the ruler who had preceded Snoke, when the region around the forest was nothing more than a distant corner of a moribund empire.

The old soldier recalled a similar illness, he said. It had struck a small group of soldiers, garrisoned inside the woods during the first year of Snoke’s reign. Snoke had entered the forest by himself – it would be another fifteen years before he lured his first apprentice to the fortress.

The old man was stout and strong, and not superstitious in the least. Yet he had told Hux he believed the disease to have been caused by some enchantment. Once Snoke came out of the woods, several days later, the curse had been lifted. The disease never struck another soldier while Snoke was alive.

When Snoke’s apprentices had come to bury their victims in the glade, Snoke had requested that they use their hands. This time, Kylo could have brought a spade. It had not seemed right, somehow.

He sank to his knees in the middle of the glade, removed his gloves, and began to dig.

Ben had lost his father’s heart in the forest.

He was uncertain when it had happened, exactly. Perhaps it had been when he had disobeyed his parents, and strayed too far inside the woods. His mother had told him to always keep the mountain in sight, to never let the trees hide the scorched flanks of the peaks.

He had disobeyed her, and he had met Snoke.

At first the ground held firm against his fingers, the same resistance he had encountered when he had tried to drive his sword through Snoke’s weathered chest. He kept scrabbling at the earth until his fingers were scratched raw. The cough returned, and with each wracking fit he spat some more blood into the shallow pit. It was immediately swallowed by the poisoned ground. He felt more than heard the earth’s contented sigh, and the ground seemed to swell under his fingers, begging for more.

It seemed futile to attack the ground with his sword, and he was wary of wielding it with his bloody hands, when the sword had the same lust for blood as the hostile undergrowth.

In the darkness, he felt for his right hand with his left, searching with cautious fingers for the broken skin between his thumb and forefinger. He touched a few remaining scabs where he had tried to burn the shoot, and in between, he found the growing twig, twisting like a vine around the back of his hand. He took a deep steadying breath and plunged his hand into the ground. And as the earth gave way, he could have sworn that his fingers were stone, that the sleeve rubbing against his arm was the enveloping branch of one of the surrounding trees. The wound in his hand was no longer a frightening deformity but a new source of power, tying him back to the protective woods.

His fingers closed around something. He had reached so far down that his face was pressed against the ground, and he could feel the earth breathe. He knew then, irrevocably, that this was not the forest breathing, but something intolerably outlandish, something younger than the trees and far older than Snoke. He gripped what felt like prickly feathers and oozing flesh, like protruding bones and moist, slippery blood. He pulled.

‘I fear I will fail’, Ben had told Snoke, fifteen and still growing. He did not hold up his too-long sword with the limited strength of his narrow wrists, but with the air he felt flowing around him, in currents he had played with long before he knew how to walk or speak.

‘I will help you’, Snoke had said, as his gaunt hand settled atop Ben’s shoulder, heavier than it had any right to be. ‘Lure them inside the forest, and I will guide your hands.’

It had been so deceptively easy, to invent a quest for his uncle’s eager trainees. In a single file, they had followed him inside the cursed woods, with Rey bringing up the rear, dancing upon the moss, her hands reaching for a stray butterfly.

Kylo wrapped the misshapen curse inside his cloak, making sure that the fabric covered the living, pulsating being entirely before he let himself collapse on the ground.

He coughed once more, shielding his face in the crook of his arm. When the fit had subsided, leaving his elbow stained with blood, he rolled onto his back, his chest heaving.

Above his head, so small that at first he thought he had dreamt it, he glimpsed an opening between the treetops, and framed within it, the starry sky.

He dragged the creature to the edge of the woods, and killed it at some distance from the first row of trees.

Unlike the one he had found in the deserted dunes of the south, this curse did not shriek or flail. Its blood spurted thick and malodorous, but the heart his sword finally found was shrivelled and rotten. It sunk in like the skin of a too-ripe fruit.

At his back, the wind coursed through the trees, drawing a prolonged whistle from their moving branches. Whatever presumptuousness was left in Kylo, he did not dare interpret the sound as praise.

The council meeting was long over when Kylo stumbled inside the throne room. A single candelabrum was lit, painting the council table a warm yellow and mustering a glint from the ornate arms of the throne. Hux sat with his cheek sinking against his closed fist, his long legs extended before him. Kylo could not remember having ever seen him look so remiss. Hux always seemed to carry around a tenseness that would one day snap his bones in two.

‘What happened to your hand?’ Hux asked.

Kylo did not immediately understand that Hux was not referring to the dirt and blood. He noticed with a tremor that he had left his gloves back in the glade, and that the sprig growing from his hand was exposed to the feeble candlelight. Hux did not look overly troubled by the sight.

_With your fear of spells and curses, how can this leave you unmoved?,_ Kylo thought, and it was only when Hux answered that he realized he had projected the question.

‘I don’t fear your spells and curses’, Hux said, with a stiff little shrug that was far more like his usual self than his lazy sprawl on the high-backed throne. ‘I don’t fear you.’

Kylo remembered a time when Hux’s arrogance had been a constant source of aggravation. Before Phasma had approached him with her talk of a military coup, Hux had been a figure better avoided. Most of Snoke’s troops had been shaped into mute obedience. This was all he could read when he attempted to get a glimpse of their thoughts – the heavy silence of a white landscape, streaked, occasionally, with a bright burst of fear. In Hux, however, the adherence to Snoke’s talk of order was near fanatical, a whirlwind of ambitions and unshakeable resolve. Brushing against his mind felt like seizing a handful of burning coals.

He walked to the foot of the throne, gazed down at Hux, and offered his hand. Hux leaned forward and took a hold of it between gloved fingers. He probed the vine-like sprigs with stilted care, and then the charred black flesh that surrounded the base of the shoot.

‘You burnt it’, he said. ‘Why?’

‘I thought it was a curse.’

‘Is it?’ Hux’s tone seemed to imply that this was a serious conversation. It was difficult to correlate this fact with the way Hux’s fingers kept searching his skin, winding around the sprigs to stroke the back of his hand, creeping up his wrist, and then down towards his fingertips, scraping off the blood and dirt.

‘The woods are not cursed’, Kylo said, eventually. ‘There was a curse in the soil. It is gone now.’ Slowly he pulled his hand back, until Hux’s fingers were left grasping for air. Kylo had always been more at ease reaching out with the ebbing tides he felt around him than with his own two hands, and he directed a sliver of air towards Hux, let it slide down his gloved hand and inside the sleeve of his tunic. He felt the way Hux shivered, and saw him try to repress it with a tight-lipped scowl.

‘I doubt you did this with my best interests in mind’, Hux snarled, slamming his arm down on the armrest as if that alone might shake him free. Kylo obligingly drew back the invisible threads of air. It mattered little. Hux might be sitting on the throne, but the balance of power was not in his favour, and they both knew it.

‘It is one thing to free our passage to the south’, Hux went on, still acerbic. ‘But it is another entirely to lift whatever spell Snoke had cast over the woods...’

‘I don’t think it was Snoke’s doing’, Kylo interjected, not bothering to speak up because he knew his casual assumption that people would fall silent and listen was something Hux resented. Hux with his strident speeches, and his persistent fear that no gathering would pay attention to him, not until he had frightened every last member of his audience into submission.

‘It doesn’t matter whether the curse predated Snoke or not!’ Hux snapped. ‘Now anyone can cross the forest. Your family will have a field day.’ A brittle laugh escaped Hux’s lips at Kylo’s horrified expression. ‘Did you think I didn’t know?’, he jeered. Even though Kylo was still towering over him, Hux did not cower but resumed his earlier stance, leaning lazily into his hand. ‘It is hardly a secret you came from the West.’

Kylo lashed out before he could think better of it. Ghostly fingers seized Hux’s neck in a vice-like grip, throwing him back against the hard back of the throne. Hux’s mouth twisted in a strangled snarl as he tried to fight the invisible chokehold, his fingers clutching at his neck.

The pressure dissolved as quickly as it had appeared. Hux tried to regain his breath, his head bent low.

‘Your throat is bruised’, Kylo said. His anger had been replaced by a spark of inquisitive curiosity. ‘What happened?’

Hux found enough breath in his lungs to raise his head and look up in bewildered anger. ‘I believe a sorcerer attempted to strangle me with a gust of wind!’

‘I am no sorcerer’, Kylo said, offhandedly. ‘A curse-breaker, at best. At worst...’ He reached out tentatively, trying to touch Hux’s neck. Hux batted his hand away with a winded insult.

‘I did not mean... This’, Kylo tried to explain, with a vague wave at Hux’s still-laboured breathing. ‘I felt it. Beneath it. Your throat is sore. I could feel the blood. Did you cough blood?’

Hux looked up with a startled expression that Kylo was familiar with. It was the look of a wounded animal that expected to be put down.

‘It is nothing’, Hux said. _I must be dying. He knows I am dying, and all will have been for naught. He will throw me down from the throne. He knows everything. Did he know all along? That I was dying, that I wanted the throne, that I wanted him to... – GET OUT OF MY HEAD!_

Kylo took a staggering step back. He shook his head, a failed attempt at steering himself clear from the jumble of Hux’s thoughts.

‘It must be a consequence of the blood oath’, he said. It came out as an indistinct mumble, and he repeated himself, his voice steadier. ‘I thought... I knew if I pledged myself to you, Snoke’s hold on me would weaken. I would not have been able to defeat him, otherwise. I hadn’t thought... That there would be other consequences, as well.’ He sighed. ‘You are not dying. I should think it is rather more like a warning signal. We draw strength from each other. If I stray too far...’

‘If I send you more than a few miles away, I will cough blood? Well, you really did think this plan through, didn't you?’ Hux scoffed, but the relief was palpable in his voice. He sprung to his feet, knocking Kylo out of his way with a nasty jab of his elbow. ‘I need some sleep’, he muttered, and set off towards the doors.

When Kylo did not move from his sullen station by the throne, Hux stopped and called out, with his back still turned.

‘Well, are you coming?’


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux could not shake the feeling that that dreadful forest was inside Ren, that it was moss he tasted on Ren’s tongue and soft soil on the roof of his mouth. It felt like another oath, as mysterious and reckless as the first one had been.

When the messenger came through the door, Hux was discussing the intricacies of golden hairnets. This was not a conversation he'd ever expected to have in his life, and certainly not of his own free will.

In the past few weeks, one of his advisors had begun to refer with increasing frequency to what he called 'the desirability of enduring peace'.

Hux had never thought about marriage, although upon examining the question, he had concluded there was some element of truth to the advisor's suggestions. A well-chosen bride could cement a successful alliance. It could prevent another costly campaign.

Such reflexions did not take into account the fact that Hux felt more at home in times of war than he did during the stifling periods of peace. They were, above all, the result of pragmatic thoughts. The Emperor must consider the advantages of a union. Hux refused to dwell on their setbacks.

As he debated, he took to accepting occasional invitations from the rare few women of the fortress. And thus it was that he found himself seated between the wife of one of his generals and her daughter, a strong girl of seventeen who seemed to resent having been forced into a dress instead of the cast-over tunic and breeches she generally wore. She reminded Hux, distantly, of Phasma.

Her lady mother had followed her husband to the fortress some ten years ago. She had been brought up in a small castle by the sea, on one of the northern islands. She had never taken to living in the fortress, although she had been seeking Hux out for some months now with talks of winter balls and summer outings. For some reason, she was under the impression that he would be more receptive to such suggestions than Snoke had been.

'The weaving must not be too thick, or the pearls will not stand out', she explained, as she tangled a few more inches of the golden hairpiece around Hux's fingers. 'I have requested only four strands, but they must be braided with the utmost delicacy...'

The messenger coughed discreetly. Hux turned towards him with guarded relief.

'The marshal sent me, your Highness.'

'Could it not wait?' Hux asked, wishing that it could not, indeed, and that his presence were immediately requested.

'There has been a... An altercation, your Highness. In the training yards. Lord Ren and a group of soldiers of the Crescent.'

Not for the first time, Hux wondered if giving Phasma lands and a title had been a wise move. Now, his former captain had a coat of arms and hundreds of devoted soldiers, all too happy to bear the narrow moon and the three pointed waves upon their shields. They treated it like a badge of honour.

'I am afraid I must attend to this matter', Hux told the two women, in what he believed was a passable attempt at courtesy.

Ren had a tendency to aggravate a soldier on any other day, and more often than not, no intervention was needed – except, perhaps, that of the undertaker. Certainly not the Emperor's.

Hux wondered in passing if Ren had heard him dragging his feet to this meeting all the way from the training yards, and if he had decided, in his juvenile, short-sighted manner, to intervene.

A small crowd had gathered in the main training yard. Hux remained at the top of the staircase, reluctant to meddle with these underlings. His arrival did not go unnoticed. He saw a few heads turn, and fingers were pointed non-too-discreetly in his direction. He searched the crowd until his eyes had found one of his informers, a kitchen hand with a sly face and a bright shock of blond hair. Reassured that he would have at least a partial report of the moods of the crowd, he leaned against the stone parapet, and awaited the spectacle.

Ren's most vocal challenger was a barrel-chested man with a thick black beard speckled with grey. He looked nothing like Ren’s usual opponents. These men were often nervous drunkards, nasty on a good day, tenacious as leeches when the wind turned. This time around, as far as Hux could tell, the soldier was not in his cups. His anger had a different quality to it – it was steady, slow-moving. Hux could see it in the man’s posture, in the way the muscles of his arms were taut from the shoulders to the hands clenched around his broadsword. He roared at Ren, but every move was measured with instinctive precision. Hux had seen many soldiers like this one since he had joined the army. Such men were born with an innate understanding of combat, and the addition of brute strength could turn them into an unstoppable force.

Ren had drawn his sword and the men in the yard gave him a wide berth, save for the three who must have defied him in the first place. Even though the soldier in their lead was tall and broad, he was not as tall as Ren. The knight’s limbs reminded Hux of a tree in winter, with a sleek black bark, and something unerringly twisted about the way the long branches reached out, latching onto the air.

In spite of the raucous cheering and jeering, some of the words exchanged by Ren and the three soldiers reached Hux on the landing.

‘Don’t think we’ll let you come at us with your cursed sword’, one of the men called out.

Hux vaguely wondered what could have brought on this fight. It did not require much imagination. Ren would have walked across the yards with that angry stride of his, and he'd taken out his pent-up aggression against the first passer-by.

Without a doubt, Ren resented the loss of his former privilege - a separate courtyard where he could spar alone. That allowance had once been given to Snoke’s knights. It made little sense to extend it to Ren alone, when there were fifty or more soldiers garrisoned in the fortress at all times.

With his predisposition to overreact, Ren had stopped training in the yards altogether. He only came through on his way to the stables, in order to retrieve his horse and go train or sulk elsewhere, most likely in the woods.

Hux would often get an inkling of Ren’s activities, while poring over some dignitary’s letter, or while attending a meeting. It could be a fleeting feeling, as if the soft branch of a pine had brushed along his arm, or he would suddenly bear the brunt of Ren’s exercises, his body laden with incomprehensible aches, rivulets of sweat running down his back, staining the fine tunic he had chosen for his fancy gathering. If Ren strained himself too much – and he almost always did – Hux would feel the blood gathering at the back of his throat, threatening to throw him into a bone-rattling fit. Ren had learnt his lesson on that front, however, and when the tide came he held back, let himself fall to the ground and rest. It was a temptation Hux always found hard to resist – this sudden impulse to let himself doze off in the middle of whatever it was that he had been doing, with the erroneous gratification of having achieved a great physical effort, and the half-dreamt presence of Ren asleep at his back.

Down in the yard, for some unfathomable reason, Ren had sheathed his sword.

Hux and most of the crowd watched with barely concealed curiosity as Ren stalked off to the nearby armoury, unbuckling his sword belt as he went. He handed the sword to a page with an inaudible comment that caused the child’s back to straighten. Back in the yard, two of the three soldiers were issuing loud, boisterous claims to their waiting companions – the yard was now awash with the red and silver of Phasma’s livery. The tall bearded soldier who had challenged Ren was waiting, an immovable pillar in the middle of the assembly, his hands still holding his sword in a loose grip.

Ren stepped out of the armoury, holding a new weapon. It was a training sword, barely more than a long stick with a blunted edge. He stopped a few feet from the soldier, shoulders drawn in and helmet low. He gave the wooden sword a few experimental swings.

‘Your Highness?’

Hux turned from the scene to find a child at his side. It was the page Ren had entrusted his sword to, a girl of no more than twelve or thirteen years old. She was small for her age but with dark, searching eyes. Her stare unsettled Hux long enough for it to matter, for her to take advantage of his distraction to press Ren’s belt and scabbard into his hands. She bowed mutely and ran down the stairs. Hux dropped the sword to the ground and felt Ren wincing, ten feet below.

_This sword is valuable._

_Because it is cursed?_ Hux thought, annoyed by the whole ordeal, by the very fact that he had felt obligated to attend, and willing, more than anything, to irritate Ren.

 _Yes._ Even as a phantom in Hux’s head, Ren’s voice was morose. _All of our swords were. You have seen it._ In the yard below, Ren and the soldier were slowly circling each other and the crowd fell back. A fragile silence had descended upon the gathering.

Hux wanted a more detailed explanation. He reflected that it must have had to do with the blood, the blood shed and smeared upon the sword. He remembered, vividly, the bright red sheen of Ren’s sword in the forest, nearly a year ago. He tried to form a question Ren might easily lift from his mind, but with his customary disregard of Hux’s immediate needs, Ren chose that moment to barge inside his head, his voice jarring. _Do I not deserve a favour?_ And then, when Hux’s head reflected nothing but an appalled silence, _Is this not the tradition, for knights who enter a fight before the object of their affections?_

It pained Hux to no end that he considered, even for a second, tearing off a glove and flinging it down at Ren. It mattered little that he would never have done it, that he quenched the thought the moment it took form. Ren had caught it clear as day, and he sprung into the fight with renewed vigour. It was as if his perpetual torpor had suddenly been lifted, and where he usually flicked off an opponent with lazy sweeps of the sword, he was now charging with reckless abandon, the wooden sword crying as it met the soldier's iron blade.

Hux held the back of a hand to his cheek, and tried to tell himself that it was the bite of the wind that had set his face aflame, and not shame, or Ren’s absurd display of skill.

The first time Hux had seen Ren fight had also been the first time he had seen Ren.

The knight was quite young back then, around sixteen years old, perhaps younger. Hux did not know that at the time. It would take years before he saw Ren’s face. The temper tantrums seemed to indicate youth, or at least immaturity. Ren's height, which had been impressive even then, made it easy to imagine a weathered warrior beneath the mask.

Snoke's knights might as well have been ageless, anyways. When Hux did imagine flesh beneath their armour, it was the concave, hollowed out bodies of men and women long dead. This thought returned from time to time after he'd finally seen Ren's face. He would dream of placing his palm against Ren's armoured chest, and his hand would go straight through. It was a feeling like that of turning over fresh soil, and when he woke up, Hux would always inspect his nails, expecting to see them coated in dirt.

Hux was older than Ren when they met, but it made little difference. He felt untried, though not overly eager to discover what sort of future awaited him. It had felt, at the time, as if he was only waiting for something or someone to break him in. Sometimes he thought it would be his father, sometimes Snoke. In the end, it had been neither. War had come to the kingdom, and Hux had been swept along, thrown into the midst of battles, thrown against angry men and at the dark trunk of rustling trees. He had lain broken under the cover of the forest with a sword in hand much like Ren would years later, and he had decided then that he would no longer be the blind object of fate. He blamed the war, but the war had Snoke's face. It had his father's hands.

The first time he'd seen Ren fight, Hux had been part of the bustling crowd, and Snoke had stood at the turn of the stair. Ren had had a wooden sword then as well, and he'd used it to take down five of Snoke's apprentices, the staff catching one black-clad figure at the knees, knocking another in the head, slamming so hard into the third's chest that Ren's adversary had cried out in pain. Snoke's knights were still human then, despite their armour and their impenetrable helmets, and Hux had heard the fallen apprentice whimper long after he had been struck, his sobs echoing strangely inside the big iron helmet.

The fourth apprentice Ren subdued with a vicious blow to the throat. Before his opponent’s crumpled form had even touched the ground, he had turned with infallible instinct, and deflected a blow from his final challenger. Hux remembered that particular move above all else, for the way the sword of Ren's rival had seemed to slowly bend before it shattered into a thousand splinters. The apprentice had emitted an ear-splitting cry, hands flying to their helmet, and Hux had caught sight of a long, jagged piece of wood protruding from the visor.

Ren had taken a staggering step back. The hand that held the wooden staff was visibly shaking. And then, with an unhurried inevitability that had been horrifying to watch, the practice sword had turned against him – the stick had slid from his hand, inch by inch, and as it did, a crack formed along its length, producing a sharp splinter that sliced cleanly through Ren’s hand.

Hux had assumed, at the time, that it had been Snoke’s doing, a warning against Ren going too far. The scene had ended with Snoke bringing Ren to his knees with a flick of his hand and a contemptuous warning. _A killing blow should not be dealt with a wooden sword._

As Hux watched Ren duel the soldier, it struck him that he had not seen Ren fight with a wooden sword in fifteen years.

A nagging doubt began to grow at the back of his mind. According to Ren, there was a force in the woods that did not answer to Snoke. A power that was as likely to guide Ren’s hand as it was to rip through his skin.

Perhaps Snoke had not turned Ren’s wooden sword against him. It might have been the wood's doing.

Hux looked out at the yard, where Ren had just swung his sword sideways, catching the soldier hard in the ribs with what seemed like a casual flick of his wrist.

In recent months, Ren had taken to wielding his sword one-handed. Hux had assumed, at first, that this was another of Ren’s self-imposed bouts of recklessness. The decision had made more sense when Ren had showed him the strange vines that grew out of his right hand, hindering his movements.

And yet, although he was still fighting one-handed, Hux realized that Ren now held the wooden staff in his right hand – and the piece of wood in his hand was singing, an inaudible hum that Hux would not have heard if he had not felt it in his own hand, as if he were also down in the yard, directing Ren’s arm towards the exposed throat of one of the soldier’s comrades.

He took a step back from the parapet and felt something rustling against the back of his tunic. The air was permeated with the strong resinous smell of the pines. Hux brought his arm up as he turned around, expecting to brush aside the dense branches of firs. He found nothing but the cracked stone wall of the fortress, and the marshal, who stared at him with undisguised curiosity.

Hux blinked. He promptly drew back his arm, and pretended to adjust the clasp of his cape. ‘Yes?’

‘I hope your Highness will forgive me sending that message.’

The marshal was a tall man, with arms as thick as tree trunks and a proud square jaw. He reminded Hux of his father, without the feverish glint Hux had so often glimpsed in his father’s eyes, and sometimes, in his own.

‘We both know I asked you to alert me in the event of such an incident’, Hux replied. The marshal’s eyes were on the sword and scabbard at his feet, and Hux stared at his hard-lined face until the man’s gaze slowly refocused on him. ‘What happened?’

‘Words were exchanged’, the marshal said. ‘I don’t know what words. Now, your Highness. I know troops need their stimulation, but it can’t be called stimulation if they can’t win, can it? And against his lordship, well. They never win.’

Had it been anyone but the marshal, Hux would have balked at the familiar tone. But he had come to trust the man’s gruff honesty. The marshal had closed the stables to Snoke’s knights on the day of the uprising. He had driven his sword through the gatekeeper, who had proven loyal to the king.

‘I will have a word with Lord Ren’, Hux said. He looked absently at his glove, where a drop of rain had just fallen. He wondered how he might convince Ren to either ignore the soldiers’ taunts, or purposefully lose a fight in order to bolster their ego.

 _You will have a word with me?_ Ren’s voice was slightly mocking. Hux looked down to find Ren’s face raised towards him, inscrutable as it was through the black helm. He was standing in a circle of his fallen foes. The crowd had already begun to disperse, fleeing the coming rain. Phasma’s soldiers exchanged disgruntled murmurs as they shuffled off towards the gatehouse.

 _I will have a word from you, if not several,_ Hux thought. He was about to step away from the parapet and towards the shelter of the building, when he remembered Ren’s sword. As he bent down to retrieve it, he could feel the marshal’s eyes on his back.

‘I would have picked it up’, the marshal said.

‘We have all seen what becomes of kings who never rise from their thrones’, Hux snapped. Ren’s sword was inordinately heavy in his hand, and he could feel his blood responding to it, thrumming inside his palm where his glove met the hilt. It took all his willpower to resist throwing the cursed thing as far away from him as he could. It did not feel like the forest, like the heady embrace of the trees. It did not even feel like Ren. And still, it called to him. He was about to slide the blade free from its sheath when he felt Ren’s hand wrap around his, pushing the hilt down until the last inch of the blade had disappeared inside the scabbard.

_She is thirsty, always. She would have your blood as well as any enemy’s._

Ren was still in the yard, the rain coursing down his helmet. Yet Hux could feel the warm pressure of his palm on the back of his hand, stronger and more palpable somehow than the strange call of the sword.

Hux stood by one of the windows of his room. He watched the storm. Thick black clouds had rolled in from the east, and they hovered over the sea, streaked with the occasional fork of lightning. Peering through the sheets of rain, he tried to see if the merchant ship that his treasurer expected had found its way to the harbour. Surely the Empire needed the trade the northern isles could provide, sheepskins and copper and the colourful jewellery that could so easily be sold, now the route to the south had been reopened. Yet Hux found himself leaning out the window, gazing at the stone battlements of the fortress down below, where the white waves came to break. He searched with a dim, undefined hope, for the shattered remnants of a ship. As he rested comfortably against the windowsill, he imagined precious chests and drowned corpses, drifting in and out with the tide.

‘Your Highness summoned me.’

Ren held his helmet under one arm. In the half-light, his dark eyes seemed unusually bright.

Hux gestured towards the bed, where he had dropped Ren’s sword upon entering the room. He had carried the sword with him all afternoon, throughout a tense meeting with a royal envoy from the eastern provinces, and then to the testing of a new weapon, an explosive device of less magnitude than the one the Empire had used in the western mountains. Later during the day, Hux had leaned the sword against the throne while he decorated three soldiers for feats of bravery. His hand had returned to it, once or twice, during the feast that followed.

‘I would rather not touch this again’, he said, with a distant gesture towards the sword. ‘Take it out of my sight.’

Ren walked over to the sword and picked it up. He made no move to depart.

‘You have questions’, he ventured. Hux found his behaviour surprisingly docile after the appalling showdown in the training yards.

He crossed the room towards his desk and sat down. He did not suggest Ren do the same.

‘These powers of yours’, he said. ‘Explain them to me.’

Ren raised his eyebrows. _Are we having this conversation now? I thought you were afraid._

‘I am not afraid’, Hux countered testily, although he had avoided any mention of Ren’s extraordinary abilities until then, for precisely that reason. ‘Explain it to me’, he repeated. And with magnanimity, he added, ‘you can put down that ridiculous helmet.’

Ren set down the helmet and the sword. The woollen counterpane sank deep under the weight of the helmet, and Hux considered telling Ren to put his gear elsewhere, maybe in a distant corner, or on the floor. He glowered instead, and rapped the armrest of his chair with impatient fingers. This did not have any effect on Ren. He considered his answer for a long time before he spoke again. When he did, his voice remained pensive, and painfully unhurried.

‘Do you remember the day you returned from the east?’ he asked. ‘I reached out to you, helped you, so you wouldn’t fall from the saddle.’

‘We must remember this day differently. As I recall, I didn't need any help. But a strange wind rose and nearly knocked me off my horse.’

Ren ignored the jibe. ‘It felt like following a gust of wind’, he said. ‘Drifting along the currents, finding the right one. And then following it to you, and fitting it against your back. It was like the wind was in my hands.’

‘The wind, or something that resembled a wind?’ Hux asked.

‘The wind, I think’, Ren said, though he sounded indecisive. ‘When I wield the sword, the feeling is the same... My mind slides along the blade, orients it. Better than my hands.’ Ren shook his head. ‘Maybe it isn't the same. The blade responds to blood. To some extent, it guides itself. His Supreme...’ He caught himself, eyes widening a fraction. For a second, he seemed to have forgotten where he was. ‘Snoke’, he said, hesitantly, when he had used the name liberally in recent weeks. ‘Snoke taught us how to enchant the swords.’

‘How?’ Hux interjected sharply.

Ren looked distressed. ‘I can’t...’ _I will not even allow myself to think it_ , Hux heard, not within his own mind, but as if he had been allowed a sudden glimpse of what lay behind Ren’s dark eyes. Then he was thrown back inside his own head, and a tangle of Ren’s memories followed him, the force of them pushing him back against the chair. He saw a meeting of silhouettes in a dark glade amongst the pines. Hands digging inside the venous ground, pushing something deep into the earth. The ground was alive, sentient. Hux could feel it breathe, the forest floor rising and subsiding ever so slightly under his knees. He was suddenly one of the figures, his hand touching the wet, leathery shape of his buried offering. And then he was standing in a circle with the other figures, their swords firmly planted in the ground.

A sound reached his ears, which he would never have expected to hear again. Snoke’s voice, gravelly and slow, wrapping itself around his mind like the tightest of chains.

_All blood shed on these blades will awaken a thirst that only blood can abate._

‘We knew not to bleed on each other’s swords’, Ren said, jerking Hux out of the dark glade and back inside his room, where a fire blazed in the hearth, and the storm still raged beyond the closed windows. The roar of the thunder, the measured thread of Ren’s voice were a comfort after the oppressive dampness of the cursed woods. ‘The blood clings to the sword, and then there is no evading it again. Not until it is buried deep in the flesh.’ Ren shrugged. ‘Blood spells are useful in battle, although I believe Snoke meant them as protection. He wasn't a conqueror.’

Hux could not shake the memory of the glade, and of the ground breathing under his feet. He thought of the soil sinking beneath his boots, twisted roots reaching up to ensnare him, to drag him down and bury him alive. They would pry open his chest, and enchant a new blade from the blood of his dripping heart.

‘It is madness’, he said, forcing strength back into his voice. ‘No one should tamper with such evil.’ _I will not build an Empire on such restless ground. I would rather have the evil of men at my back, than this curse under my feet._

‘It is gone’, Ren said. He reached for the sword, and let it fall to the paved floor with a resounding clang. The sound combined with a sudden thunderclap to make Hux jump like a frightened child. Ren took advantage of Hux’s distraction to sit down on the bed. He looked around him with some curiosity, as if he had never seen the room before. In the light of the fire, he looked older. Hux had always viewed Ren as little more than an unsheathed sword. He realized, for the first time, that the knight was not as guileless as he had thought.

'This wind you follow, does it come from the woods?' he asked.

Ren seemed to be about to speak, but he changed his mind. Hux felt the incoming whirl of images and tried to resist it, grimacing against the intrusion.

'Once was enough!'

'It is a different sort of memory', Ren said. He had extended a hand as if this might push the memory past Hux's barriers. Hux could see him hesitating now, and he wondered if Ren knew what he was doing, or if this was new for him as well, a clumsy experiment with powers yet untried. An image flickered at the edge of his thoughts, green grass and sun-dappled bramble, with a line of trees at the background, the coolness of their shade perceptible even where he stood, a few feet away from the forest.

Before Hux had quite grasped what was happening he had stepped fully within Ren's memory. He held a wooden staff, with hands that were not his own - Ren's, he supposed, though the wrists were thinner, the hands smaller.

The younger Ren gave an enthusiastic swing of the staff, and Hux heard a laugh at his back. He turned to find a man behind Ren, with dark blond hair and a youthful grin that belied the lines etched deep in his face. His pale blue eyes were steeped in shadows, but the look he turned on Ren was kind, perhaps even affectionate.

'You are too eager', the man said. 'You must learn to feel the wind, to wind it around the staff so it guides your swing. And you should focus more on the wood. It's not because it has been cut out and carved that it no longer responds to you.'

The man uncrossed his arms, the grey woollen sleeve of his robe falling back to reveal a dark, mangled hand. The hand was not flesh, Hux realized with a start, but wood, small branches tangled with ivy, the knobs in the bark marking the joints of the fingers. The man casually waved the wooden hand and the staff flew from Ren's fingers, diving straight into one of the thorn bushes.

'In the bramble?' Ren asked, his young voice filled with exasperation, and a hint of contempt.

'You won't have to dive in the bramble if you can call it from where you stand', the man remarked. He was smiling, still, as if he hadn't detected Ren's tone, or as if he didn't mind it.

Ren stalked off towards the bushes with an obvious intent to displease. Hux could tell it would fail. Ren had apparently not been good at reading people back then, be it their minds of their faces.

Ren came to a stop at the edge of the woods, where the end of the staff was visible from among a tangle of branches. It wasn't the staff, however, that had caught Ren's attention, but something else, something inside the forest. Hux saw the woods through Ren's eyes. There was nothing there, nothing but the dark trunks of the trees, and the void between them, only slightly less dark.

Then he noticed the whisper. It came from the woods, and though the words were clear, the murmur did not rise from the surrounding trees.

_Dwell where others dare not, at the heart of the woods where light comes to die. Find the glade of the rising knights._

A voice sounded at Ren's back.

'Ben!'

A cry of warning. It couldn't drown out Snoke's insidious call.

'Enough.'

Hux’s eyes refocused on the room in the tower, on the knight sitting across from him. Ren's face was tense.

'I am not... I only meant to show you the beginning of that day. He explained it better than I would. How to summon the wood. To follow the wind currents.' He anticipated Hux's half-formed question. 'My uncle', he said, and there was an echo of the young boy in him then, in his brisk, petulant tone.

'I was right in thinking these powers of yours aren't only a result of Snoke's spells and curses', Hux said, smug. 'There is something else here we could use. You don't rely on the woods alone. You spoke of the wind.'

He turned towards the fire. Ren flinched.

‘No’, he said. In the crackling of the burning logs, Hux heard the sound of the forest burning, trees tumbling down in a shower of ashes. He understood that the true extent of Ren’s powers mattered little. Just as he had once been constrained by Snoke’s will, he would now obey the enchanted forest.

Hux stared at the fire, a wild gleam in his pale green eyes. He remembered the explosion that had torn the mountain apart, and he tried to imagine what such fire would become with Ren's hands to mould it, to guide it deeper than any mining crew could dig, where it might set the world itself aflame, a fire that would never go out.

‘Would you try?’ he asked, unable to keep the yearning from his voice. ‘Would you try to use your power without relying on the woods?’

The look Ren turned on Hux was alive with something Hux hesitated to name. It looked like hope. It looked like hunger. Hux turned away, feeling his heart knock wildly against his ribcage.

There was a distant sound, not unlike a trickle of soot falling down a chimney. Hux turned towards the fireplace. The flames sizzled. He leaned closer, craned his neck to look up the chimney. Another cascade of droplets fell upon the flames. He looked back to where Ren sat, his left hand upturned on the covers. His fingers curled in a slow, beckoning gesture. It was directed towards the window, towards the rain beyond it. Ren’s gaze had lost its focus. The trickle of rain intensified in the fireplace, until it became a regular patter. There was a flash of lightning outside, and for an unsettling moment, Hux thought he had seen the storm reflected in Ren’s eyes, a bright fork of light dancing across his pupils, leaving behind a strange afterglow.

The rain now fell in earnest in the hearth, and with a final angry whistle, the last of the flames died out, plunging the room into darkness. At the same moment, Hux heard Ren cough. It sounded, at first, as if he were clearing his throat. But what had begun as a dry cough soon became a retching sound. Another flash of lightning illuminated a befuddling scene. Ren was hunched over, one hand braced against the floor. He was coughing up what appeared to be mouthfuls of liquid onto the carpet.

The room smelled of the forest after a storm, of fresh rainwater, but also of its aftermath – of the mould spreading under the flagstones, of rotting wood and of pools of stagnant water.

Hux hurried to the bed, much as he had a year before, when he had rushed to the woods to retrieve his fallen knight. He knelt at Ren’s side, trying to shove the tangle of black hair away from his face. Ren was still coughing up copious amounts of rainwater. With a jolt of disgust, Hux noticed that there were also damp weeds falling from Ren’s mouth, a dark knotted mass that hung from his lips and seemed set on suffocating him. Hux caught a hold of the weeds. He pulled at roots and stalks, at rumpled leaves and wilted flowers.

‘What must I do?’ he asked, frantic, throwing away a cluster of weeds only to return to Ren and pry more from his trembling lips. His knees lay in a puddle of rainwater. The moist air had become stifling, and it was an ordeal to think, to muster the energy to string words together.

Hux gave up on his thankless task. He clasped the collar of Ren’s tunic, leaned forward until his forehead brushed against Ren’s heaving shoulders. He searched for a trace of the forest, and when he could not smell it in Ren’s hair, he tried to find a taste of it on Ren’s skin. He pressed his cold lips to Ren’s neck. He mouthed a series of incoherent entreaties. He had not apologized to anyone in a decade since his father’s death. He had never begged for anything in his life. And yet he was on his knees, apologizing and begging, submerged with a rampant feeling of self-disgust he barely identified as guilt.

Hux’s eyes fluttered open. His mouth was pressed to damp skin. He was on his knees on a wet carpet. When he gave a tentative sniff, Ren’s shoulder smelled of sweat and vaguely of resin. The room itself yielded the scent of fresh linen, of the fragrant wood of the desk, of the slight mustiness of the counterpane.

The heady smell of the rain was gone.

‘Ren?’ Hux muttered, and felt Ren’s body shift, ever so slightly, against his side. He received a low hum in answer. Ren’s belt dug painfully in his hip, and the knight’s arm was an oppressive weight across his front. Yet Hux resented the idea of moving. He knew that the moment he raised his head, there would be no escaping it, that swift, merciless process of winding up his nerves and muscles. He would become the soldier and the Emperor once more, a cast-iron figure from which all visible weaknesses had been removed, despite the brittleness beneath. He felt as if another spell had been cast upon the room, different in nature from the storm Ren had invited inside the tower. The stillness around them reminded Hux of the curses in folktales, where entire castles fell prey to sleeping spells and there was nothing to do but wait. Wait a month, a year, a hundred years, for the arrival of a fated rescuer.

No one had ever told Hux any tales of the sort. He had heard them in fragments and pieces, in the inns and barracks of many a war-ridden country. In most cases, he did not know how the stories ended, and quite often, he had no idea how they'd begun. What he did remember was an endless succession of unresolved situations.

It fell to reason, then, that he would not know how to undo the spell on his own folktale. How to proceed towards an ending.

‘She dies’, Ren said, somewhere above Hux’s shoulder. ‘The princess in your folktale.’

An exemplary and somewhat ridiculous display of Ren’s lack of conversation skills. Hux found himself wondering why his heart clenched in his chest. He used to blame every perplexing feeling on the blood oath. But the oath was the blood in his throat and the dizzying awareness of Ren’s movements, heightened tenfold during a fight. It did not explain the way Ren had crept under his skin, to the point where he found himself treasuring every infuriated feeling as if it constituted a memory worth revisiting.

‘What are you even talking about?’ he groaned, but he settled more comfortably, letting his body sag further against Ren’s, trusting that he would find support.

‘You were saying... Thinking. You were thinking you didn’t know the ending to that story. The tale of the cursed princess’, Ren said. ‘That’s how it ends. She dies.’

‘I think you must have forgotten a few twists and turns’, Hux mumbled. ‘She can’t be cursed to sleep forever, then sleep for a hundred years and then eventually die. These stories follow a pattern.’

‘Well, yes’, Ren said. ‘She wakes up, and the prince who came to rescue her is lying dead by her casket. He failed to break the glass and let himself die of exhaustion.’ He sounded quite grave. Hux repressed a smile. It seemed quite like Ren to treat these folktales seriously.

‘What a ridiculous death’, he commented drily. ‘And I will let you know you have no future as a storyteller. How was the curse broken, then?’

Ren thought about it for a while. ‘It wore off, I think’, he said. ‘Then she asked for the forest's help. At least, she did in the stories my... In the stories I was told. There was no castle in these stories. Sometimes, a branch fell on the casket and broke it, and she was free to spend the remainder of her life in the forest. Sometimes, the branch speared her where she lied - in accordance with her own wishes, because she didn't want to live alone. But in both versions, she did die. In the end.’

At this, Hux drew back slightly, enough that he could see Ren’s face. ‘This is a ghastly story.’

Ren shrugged. He was looking at his lap - at Hux’s hand, resting on his thigh. ‘I never saw it that way’, he said. ‘The forest always helped her, and that’s what mattered.’ He looked up, his gaze disarmingly warm. ‘Did it not help you, when you asked it to spare my life?’

Hux would have argued that he had hardly asked for a favour, and that the forest had turned against them in the first place. But before the words could leave his mouth, Ren leaned forward to kiss him, and Hux let his complaints recede in favour of grasping a handful of black hair. If the smell of the rain had disappeared from the room, there was still a trace of it in Ren’s mouth. Hux could not shake the feeling that that dreadful forest was inside Ren, that it was moss he tasted on Ren’s tongue and soft soil on the roof of his mouth. It felt like another oath, as mysterious and reckless as the first one had been.

He reached for the hem of Ren’s tunic and slid a hand beneath it, finding but a sliver of skin between the barrier of Ren’s belt and his trousers. Ren fumbled obligingly with his belt until it fell away. Grasping Hux’s wrist, he pulled at his glove, threw it aside and pushed Hux's hand under the rough fabric of the tunic. Hux flinched, breaking off the kiss with a startled gasp.

‘What in the name...’ He withdrew his hand, held it close to his face in the darkness of the room. ‘Pine needles?’ he exclaimed, with a hysterical burst of laughter. ‘Ren, there are pine needles inside your...’ His eyes widened as his hand travelled back under Ren’s tunic, finding a wealth of needles in his lap, on the inside of the fabric, caught in the seams. ‘I have no choice but to bed the forest, do I?’ he mused.

‘I always... For protection’, Ren mumbled, teeth nipping at Hux’s neck. ‘Needles and nettle. The fabric, nettle.’

‘Yes, yes, nettle’, Hux nodded fervently, slightly distracted by Ren’s mouth on his collarbone, by the sudden, heady rush of his arousal. ‘I couldn’t care less about the nettle, but if you could do something about the floor...’ He was not quite sure what he had meant by that. Maybe he had expected Ren to summon a fire that would dry the damp carpet. He had certainly not thought Ren would get a solid grip on his waist and hoist him up on the bed.

It was a deeply rooted instinct in Hux to criticize Ren's every action, but he found himself unable to contest that particular move, not with Ren's muscular arm at his back and the knight's body looming, impossibly tall, over his own. He clenched both knees around Ren's hips, caught a hold of his collar and pulled him down.

The first time Hux dreamt about Ren, he blamed it on the rumours. There were the tales Hux's soldiers brought in from the plains, of a silent monster with onyx teeth and razor-sharp claws. The foulest stories, however, Hux had pried from his chamberlain with the help of a few caskets of expensive wine. In those tales, the Emperor mounted a beast in the dark of night, and once he had been satiated, he bared his throat to the beast's teeth, and let it taste his imperial blood.

There had been something reassuring about these first fantasies: Hux knew their vileness would confine them, always, to the darkness of an empty room or of an empty tent. Hux could hide his face in his pillow and smother his dreams alongside the muffled gasps his orgasm wrenched from him. It was easy then to envision Ren as a faceless figure, even taller in Hux’s dreams than he was in reality, ready always to pin Hux to the bed and bring down the weight of a dark, unknown world upon his back, insinuating shadows deep inside him with every imaginary thrust.

The real Ren was nothing like Hux’s shameful dreams. He was not an overpowering mass, covered in impenetrable layers of dark fabric. Hux ran his hands over the taut muscles of Ren’s arms and touched the scarred flesh along his hip. He gripped Ren’s upper arm hard enough that his fingers left a mark, and he found himself hoping the red imprint would bruise. He thought it might assuage his doubts: prove that Ren was human, and not the monster the Empire whispered about, that feral thing of the woods Hux had sought in so many dreams, either to embrace or to kill.

The monster in Hux’s head was silent, a still menace at the edge of a clearing, waiting beyond the inviting murmur of the trees. Ren was anything but silent, curses slipping past his lips each time Hux’s teeth grazed his skin. The cursing devolved into an incoherent stream of entreaties when Hux’s mouth closed around his cock. Hux briefly had time to observe that this particular part of Ren’s anatomy was as overwhelming in reality as it had been in his fantasies, before his mind was invaded by Ren’s thoughts, loud and jumbled and inescapable. Hux caught a glimpse of himself through Ren’s eyes, his red hair tousled and his eyes obstinately shut, his fingers clenched tight around Ren’s muscular thighs. He saw with horror the beginning of a blush spread across his cheeks, before Ren got a better grip on his thoughts, and tore the image from Hux’s head.

Hux lay on his back, Ren’s hand wrapped possessively around his thigh, and still the room contorted before his eyes, plants creeping up the walls, strange flowers suspended in mid-air, blooming and withering in the span of a second. He saw a row of bright green beetles scuttling across the flagstones. Hux blinked and the rampant undergrowth disappeared, only to return at the periphery of his vision.

‘This scares me more than any of Snoke’s blood spells’, he told Ren’s sleeping form. When the knight didn't stir, Hux looked down at Ren’s hand, at the long fingers tainted green and brown. There was a hint of bark on the back of Ren’s forefinger, a line of moss down the inside of his thumb. The stalks on the back of his hand followed the tracery of his veins, forming an intricate lattice where months before there had only been one solitary sprig. Hux closed his eyes, and ignored the involuntary shiver that coursed down his spine.

 _This is what I want, this is what I need,_ he thought, careful to not let the thought overspill. _This is still what I want. This is still what I need._

‘Do you agree with them?’ Hux asked Phasma, after the last of his advisors had left the throne room.

‘On which matter, your Highness?’

‘War’, Hux said. ‘The likelihood of a war with the south.’

Phasma wore a new suit of armour, embossed with the crescent and waves of her coat of arms. Despite her new titles, she refused to be addressed as anything but ‘General’. Hux recognized something of himself in her cold demeanour, in her blind desire for order. The both of them had staked their lives upon the idea that their deeds would eventually serve some higher goal.

He wondered if Phasma still knew what this goal was. For a long time, he had thought it would reveal itself at the end of the road, once Snoke had been defeated. He now sat upon the throne, with a crown of silver leaves atop his head, and Phasma led an army far superior in strength and number to any other armed force this side of the world. Yet the final purpose of their quest still eluded him, if there had ever been one.

His eyes strayed, as often, to the tapestry that depicted his greatest victory. Perhaps this was another folktale. Did the giants of the old tales not tear down mountains for no other reason than to cause destruction? He had long thought himself a hero on a quest, journeying towards his crowning achievement. It suddenly occurred to him that he might have been the villain all along.

‘Is no other course of action possible in the south than an alliance or a war?’ he asked.

‘You will not marry the daughter of the southern tribes’, Phasma stated quietly. ‘If you were taking their offer in consideration, you would not contemplate a war.’

‘Will the tribes really attack us if I refuse to marry this girl?’ Hux sighed, his fingers drumming against the armrest of the throne. ‘No. This isn’t the issue. The question is, can we take them on if they do attack us?’

Phasma lowered her eyes towards her shiny helmet. Taking a few steps towards the council table, she set the helmet down carefully. Hux wasn't blind to the fact that these gestures were meant to gain some time. His hand stilled on the armrest.

‘Yes, we would prevail’, Phasma said at last. ‘Of course, we must not forget that they had thirty years to develop their warfare. What we see as a passage to the south may be a passage to the north for them. But we would have the upper hand. Our forces are more organized. Our weaponry is more advanced.’

She fell silent. She was looking at the tapestry as well. Hux wondered what she thought of it. If she found it ridiculous, as Ren did. Hux had not ordered it for himself. It was an instrument to assert his authority upon the council and the occasional foreign envoy.

‘If we can win this war, why do I sense indecision in your voice?’ he asked. ‘If you have some concerns, now is the time to voice them.’

‘We might overcome an attack from the south, but we will not succeed in holding back both the southern tribes, and the western rebels’, Phasma said. She was looking at the upper right corner of the tapestry, where a group of soldiers tumbled into a ravine. Hux noticed for the first time that it was impossible to tell whether the tiny figures were enemies, or his own soldiers.

‘What makes you think the rebels would launch a new attack? We pushed back an assault only last month. They would not attack again so soon. Unless you gained intelligence to the contrary?’

Phasma slowly turned back towards Hux, her icy blue stare pinning him to his throne. ‘Your Highness might want to hear this intelligence for themselves.’

‘Certainly’, Hux snapped. ‘You will bring your informer to me. In the meantime, would you mind telling me what all this secrecy is about?’

Phasma raised a pale blond eyebrow.

‘It appeared to me’, she said, ‘that your Highness might not trust my word alone on this matter.’

‘The matter of a rebel attack?’

‘No.’ Her gaze returned to the tapestry. ‘The matter of Lord Ren’s treason’, she said.

Hux waited until he was certain Phasma was far from the room, before he pulled a stained handkerchief from his sleeve and coughed a mouthful of blood and phlegm into the soiled fabric.

The coughing fits had returned the morning prior, two days after Ren had departed for the forest.

Hux tried to recall the exact reason Ren had given for this expedition. At any other time, he would have remembered Ren’s words with clarity, but the knight had left in the middle of the night, while Hux lay thoroughly wrecked among his tangled covers. The only facts that came to his mind were details, irrelevant to the situation at hand. The weight of Ren’s hand atop his head, gloved fingers carding through his dishevelled hair. The low rumble of Ren’s voice, so close to his ear that he'd felt a renewed stirring in his groin. And obfuscating it all, that invasive smell of resin and firs. It had acted like a balm, soothing Hux’s overstimulated senses. It had muted his mind.

Ren had said something about going to the forest, and that was all Hux could recall. He had shut his eyes against his pillow. He was fast asleep before Ren had even reached the door.

Hux met with Phasma and her informer in the dungeons of the old stone keep, where the thick walls would conceal their words from prying ears.

The informer was a young soldier, dull of features, with close-cropped red hair and a smattering of freckles across his cheeks and nose. He wouldn't look at Hux, but it seemed to be the result of his shifty nature rather than a sign of awe.

'Perhaps you might begin by explaining why you thought it necessary to trail Lord Ren', Hux suggested, worried that the situation would slip out of his control if he let Phasma direct the meeting.

'I did not want to bring unfounded suspicions to your Highness', Phasma said.

They had spent too much time mired together in Snoke's battlefields for him to not give her the benefit of the doubt.

'Before you tell me what you found', Hux said, with the nagging feeling that he was delaying the inevitable, 'how could this toy soldier of yours follow Lord Ren without being detected? My knight has unparalleled abilities when it comes to uncovering deception.'

'There is an old crone', Phasma answered levelly. 'South of the town, living in a ruin with a hundred floating flags above the door.'

'Old Maz?', Hux said, with a doubtful sneer. 'If that hag has any particular power, it's the ability to extort a coin from lovesick village girls.'

'She is knowledgeable in the healing arts', Phasma said, undeterred. 'I paid her to provide young Del here with a spell that would allow him to pass through the woods undetected.'

Hux sighed. Within this dank dungeon, with its windowless walls and the round vat of its unattainable ceiling, it was difficult not to feel like he'd walked straight into a trap. He waved an impatient hand.

'Let's assume I believe you. Leaving aside the fact that the both of us have a history of distrust when it comes to powers we cannot comprehend. The boy followed Lord Ren into the woods. What did he find out?'

Phasma turned expectantly towards the soldier. He was not standing as straight as he should have, and Hux wondered, suddenly, if the boy's shiftiness might have been related to the spell, if the purpose of the spell had indeed been to make him unobtrusive.

'Lord Ren met with a woman on the other side of the forest', the soldier said. There was something odd about his voice as well. It was breezy, evasive. 'I know the woman to be General Organa, leader of the rebels.' His mud-brown eyes briefly found his Emperor's. 'Lord Ren called her 'mother.'' There was finally a hint of a spark in his dreamy gaze, as if even he must be moved by the enormity of this piece of information.

Hux kept careful control over his features as he took a few steps, following the wall away from Phasma and the soldier. He felt Phasma's steady gaze on the back of his neck.

'General Organa has a claim to the territory beyond the Broken Peaks', Phasma said. 'A royal claim.'

'I know', Hux replied stiffly, bringing his walk to a halt at the other end of the dungeon, hands behind his back. He had to repress a sudden instinct to click his heels. His father had told him, time and again, that distress and doubt would only be solved by the stern code of military conduct. 'Last we heard, these lands had been plagued by devastating droughts.'

'And we thought the southern tribes were peaceful nomadic clans. The world beyond our borders has had time to change since Snoke accessed the throne.'

Phasma's tone was neutral, still, but the very fact that she was giving him a lecture gave Hux an indication that he needed to reassert his authority. Preferably fast.

He swivelled round and walked back towards the soldier, feeling his cape flutter satisfyingly behind him. Though he wasn't prone to abusing his height as Ren did, looming over his victims like an overgrown vulture, in that moment he took a leaf out of Ren's book and put to use the few extra inches he had on the soldier, looking at him down the bridge of his nose, his shoulders ever so slightly drawn in. Ren never stood straight. Ren never seemed tense. It never looked like he was trying to be imposing.

Perhaps his being of royal descent should not have come as a complete surprise.

'If I am to believe my most prized weapon has betrayed me', Hux snarled, a handbreadth away from the soldier's face, 'I will need more than a dubious report of him calling for his mother.'

‘Was not our aim to eradicate every remnant of Snoke’s power?’

Hux didn't answer. Having dismissed her soldier, Phasma had accompanied Hux to a small parlour. Forcing himself not to cough up the blood in the back of his throat required most of Hux’s energy, and Phasma’s continued stream of talk was falling into deaf ears.

‘He is useful to me’, Hux muttered at last. He mustered a memory: Ren on a battlefield, a blur of black limbs with a single point of focus – the blood-coated sword in the middle of the maelstrom.

‘I asked the crone about such curses’, Phasma said.

‘What?’ Hux’s eyes snapped up, one hand clenched around the handkerchief he had just pulled out of his sleeve. His body gave in and with a great shudder, he muffled a cough inside the piece of cloth, feeling the blood well up against his lips.

‘I asked her about curses that can bind people, until their will is no longer their own. Her words were troubling. She mentioned repulsive spells, where the spell-caster binds himself to his victim by blood.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ Hux muttered, bunching up the piece of fabric. ‘Have I given you any cause to doubt me?’

Phasma stared pointedly at the handkerchief. Hux stuffed it down his sleeve.

‘I will deal with Lord Ren upon his return.’ The weight of all his misgivings seemed to press down upon him, narrowing his focus to this one certainty: there was still a goal in sight. Phasma believed it. ‘If he did betray me, something will have to be done’, he said decisively. He hesitated a moment before asking his next question, but could not find it in himself to hold it back.

‘This crazy old witch. Can she break curses?’

He ordered a stable boy to saddle his horse, but he had to sit through another council meeting before he could finally set off towards the forest.

Hux couldn't shake the feeling that a storm was looming on the horizon. The meeting had been brought about by the return of two spies. The South had been mustering troops. Four clans had come together to plan an attack on the Empire, spurred by rumours of a new uprising in the West. The belligerent tribes intended to reclaim the farmlands south of the fortress, which had been impregnable while Snoke’s curse was still buried at the border.

The Empire had an army stationed in the South, and Hux had not waited for the end of the meeting to dispatch a general to lead the troops. Lookouts had also been sent to the East, to prevent any upsurge in the icy regions.

Hux rode fast through the village. He spent the short journey remembering the wars he had fought. He had been a soldier once, and there had been some comfort in knowing that he was at the bottom of the ladder, looking up. It had carried him through many a battle.

The truth was, Hux had never been a good fighter. The relevant truth was that it didn't matter, in a battlefield where the most experienced soldier could stumble to his death by tripping over the exposed roots of a cypress tree, where life of death relied upon one’s ability to get back up, no matter the wound, no matter the odds. Hux missed the urgency of it, and the blissful collapse at the end of a battle, when he traipsed inside his tent, pulled off his tunic and collapsed on his pallet with his boots still on. There had been no dreams of trees then, no fantasies.

But there had been the never-ending panic of the first assault. The wounds that never seemed to heal properly. The grime and dirt, the stale smell that clung to him like the mud or snow or ice clung to his hair. The unsatisfying encounters with soldiers behind a tent at night, hands hastily stuffed down trousers, eyes carefully averted, moans bitten back with enough desperation that he often returned to his pallet with bruised lips. The drunken brawls, seeking a bottle to the side of the head and the ensuing oblivion. Ten years of pursuing a single dream – not the dream of being Emperor, or of overcoming Snoke, or of corrupting the king’s favourite knight. No, Hux’s only yeaning then had been for a new pair of boots, the leather stiff and the calves smooth, the soles not yet worn down and warped.

As he reached the last field before the forest, Hux finally admitted to himself that he had no idea what it was, exactly, that he wanted from his life.

He brought the horse to a halt by the witch's small hut. It had been built off the side of what had once been a building of worship, now ruined. A flurry of pennants hung from the front of the hut, dyed in such a variety of colours Hux doubted he had seen them all before.

During Snoke’s reign, when the town was only a village providing the fortress with feed and fodder, everyone knew of the old woman who lived at the southernmost edge of the forest. It was a tradition for girls about to get engaged to go and pay the sorceress a gold coin for a glimpse of their future.

After his first campaign in the West, Hux and another soldier, neither of them more than seventeen, had made a bet that they would pay the gold coin and question the witch. Hux didn't know what Maz had told his companion, but he had died soon after that, skewered by an errant arrow during an archery competition. Her words to Hux hadn't been particularly useful. He couldn't even recall them properly. Something about trusting a girl. He had known, even then, that he was unlikely to ever worry whether a girl was trustworthy or not. Besides, of all the women he had met over the years, a great number of which in the army, the only one he had had cause to interact with on a regular basis was Phasma. He could not begin to imagine circumstances under which Phasma might be called a ‘girl’.

‘General.’

The voice came from a small figure, seated on a low wooden bench in front of the hut. Hux dismounted and took a few step forwards, trying to get a better view of the crone through the flapping pennants. He caught a glimpse of beady black eyes, and of wrinkled skin the colour of oak bark.

‘This is no longer my title’, he remarked. He intended to remain civil until he had obtained what he wanted.

‘It is your preferred title, though, isn't it?’ the old woman said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. ‘You favour it over your current title. Over your names, even.’

‘I have come to seek council’, Hux said, unwilling to stay too long in the shadow of the forest.

Yet, despite his qualms, he'd noticed that his cough had receded as he drew closer to the woods. The thought of Ren being nearby was devastating. It felt like relief, but of the sort that comes from passing out after receiving a knife wound.

‘I need you to undo a curse’, he told Maz.

She leaned forward, her weathered face pointing between two triangular pennants. Hux could see that she was about to refuse, no matter how wide her smile.

‘I can pay you’, he said.

‘You can, if you want to. Money’s never lost on me, boy. But I can’t break whatever curse it is you intend to break. Something tells me the spell you want to undo has to be undone by the one who cast it.’

‘I would not be here if that was a possibility’, Hux snapped, fingers tightening on the reins of his horse. The beast had taken to calmly grazing at his side, oblivious to Hux’s disquiet.

‘You mean you can’t break it?’ Max asked, raising her thin eyebrows, further crinkling her wizened forehead.

‘I didn’t cast it’, Hux scoffed.

Maz snorted. ‘Of course you did. You licked that blood, didn’t you? That’s as much a part of casting the spell as shedding the blood.’

‘Fine, then’, Hux snapped. ‘How do I break it?’

‘Did you really need to come down from your little stone castle to ask me that?’ Maz asked. Hux thought he detected a hint of amused contempt in her voice. ‘I should think it’s obvious. That spell relies on two things, doesn't it? The blood, and the sword used for the oath. Break the sword, you break the oath.’

‘Well, this wasn’t that difficult, was it?’ Hux untied a pouch from the horse’s saddle and threw it at the old woman’s feet. ‘For your troubles’, he said.

He was about to climb back onto the saddle when her sharp voice halted him. ‘You wasted your afternoon and mine if this is all you came for.’

Hux turned his head, one foot already in the saddle. ‘If you have more to say, I suggest you speak now. I have a war to prepare, and I didn't come here to ask for my fortunes like some lovelorn idiot.’

‘Didn’t you?’ Maz said, her smile wicked. ‘Find another coin in your pockets, and I will tell you what the future holds for you. It's a tradition, after all.’

‘I have no time for your riddles’, Hux warned, but still he emptied his pockets, and then the saddlebags, eventually finding a coin he tossed at Maz. She caught it between two fingers, pocketed it, and trotted across the meadow towards Hux. Stopping beneath him, she craned back her neck to get a look at his face. After a long, disquieting moment, she seemed to snap out of her daze.

‘See, you will not have come for nothing after all. I have three glimpses into your future, and not just the one. Are you listening carefully, boy?’

Hux sighed. He gave a curt nod.

‘Wonderful. Here is it, then. A knight bearing a crown wanders across the woods. The lost prince has come home at last. An empire falls.’

Hux felt the blood drain from his face. His fingers slid down the reins.

‘Well! Now all is said and done, and I’ve got my money, have a good day, boy’, Maz crooned. She sauntered back towards her hut, waving an airy hand. ‘Be on your way. Safe travel.’

‘Wait!’ Hux called, a mere croak. ‘You must give me something else.’ He tried to wrap his mind around her words, but her final warning alone rang inside his head in a multitude of disorienting echoes. ‘My empire’, he stammered. ‘I must know how.’ Or whom, he thought, but the words would not get past his lips.

‘This is not a trick I do on demand’, Maz replied, her brisk little voice surprisingly firm. ‘But since you are a young fool, I will give you a piece of advice. Bear in mind, this is not what I’ve seen – it is what I know. And what I know is this. Empires are many. They come and go. The woods alone remain. And they crown whomever they will.’

The ride back to the fortress took under two hours, during which time Hux had time to come to two rather unfortunate conclusions.

First, he was, for lack of a better word, invested in this strange relationship with Ren, to the point where the thought of Ren, the feel of him, could drive away, for a time, his dreams of worldwide domination.

And second: Ren had betrayed him.

Hux wouldn't have believed Phasma's informer alone. Even if what the boy had said was true, and Ren had indeed met with the leader of the western rebels, the soldier hadn't heard Ren make any promises. Ren had listened to the General. ('He was looking down. He looked submissive', the soldier had said, which Hux had taken to mean, 'he looked like a scolded child'. The sort of child who would murder his father for an invincible sword.)

The soldier hadn't stayed long, but he had seen Ren follow General Organa, the both of them walking back towards the rebel camp. Phasma's spy had then turned around, not trusting the cloaking spell to hold among a large force perpetually on the lookout for attackers.

If the soldier's account hadn't sufficed, Old Maz's predictions served as confirmation. Hux didn't want to set store by them. But the three cryptic sentences kept running around his head. He thought he could see what Maz must have seen - Ren returning to the fold, renouncing his former allies, renouncing Hux. Ren as some prince out of a folktale, a sight that was surprisingly easy to conjure up. Hux replaced Ren's black armour by a forest green tunic, by embroidered gloves and pale deerskin boots. He placed a silver circlet of leaves atop the dark waves of Ren's hair. The Ren in the vision turned towards him, and Hux realized he had set his own crown on Ren's head.

Hux came to with a start. He had dozed off as the horse cantered towards the fortress, and they were now rounding the last bend before the drawbridge.

Hux came to a third conclusion.

There was no telling how much of what he felt was true. The desperate longing for Ren, the boundless anger caused by his betrayal - all of it might have been a trick, the curse burrowing itself deep under his skin, making him want and burn and resent.

Phasma had been waiting by the gatehouse, in the shadow of a wooden balcony. She fell upon him the moment he entered the courtyard. Hux handed the reins of his mount to a stable boy and took a second to gather his wits while ostensibly petting the horse.

'The war has begun in the south', Phasma said. 'We received word less than an hour ago. A carrier bird has been sent to warn the troops that the General is on his way.'

'How fast can he reach them?' Hux asked. He knew precisely which officers were stationed in the southern encampment. They were good officers, able warriors, but none of them were born leaders. Without someone to coordinate a counterattack, the army ran the risk of being run into the ground.

'Two days at most. I took the liberty to order fresh horses be made available at all the inns he will encounter on his way south.'

'Good', Hux said, without much conviction. The army would have had a better chance if Phasma had gone south instead of the old general. Phasma or himself. Instead, the both of them would wait in this sordid stone mausoleum, breaking curses and awaiting carrier pigeons with bated breath. Hux briefly wished he were a common grunt once more, expected and willing to take out his frustrations on any fellow soldier, be it with a sword or his fists or a handful of mud.

Unfortunately, such behaviour did not befit an emperor.

'Concerning Lord Ren', Hux said, casting a surreptitious look about the yard. Ren was nowhere to be seen, and Hux couldn't feel the shadow of Ren's sombre presence, which usually lingered at the edge of his senses, like an inquisitive tendril of smoke.

'The only way is to kill him, isn't it?'

It felt strange to voice that thought aloud. As if it were over, already, a decision made and acted upon.

'We could try to use him to gain information about the rebels', Phasma admitted. 'But I don't think this would be a sensible course of action given the current situation. I don't suppose the traitor would be easily manipulated.'

'No', Hux acquiesced, feeling the veneer of decades crackling across his face, exposing the selfish youth beneath, his hurt and inadequacies bared for all to see. He wished he could order Phasma to avert her eyes.

'I will take care of this', he said. 'But I will require assistance.'

Phasma nodded. 'Order it, and it shall be done.'

It was the tone of his old comrade in arms, rather than that of a general addressing their emperor. He was instinctively grateful for this return to old, familiar grounds.

'I shall...distract Lord Ren’, Hux said. ‘You must obtain and destroy his cursed sword. Only then can I attack him.'

'It will be done', Phasma repeated. 'If I may ask. What will you attack him with?'

Hux waved an impatient hand. 'A sword. A dagger. Does it matter?' He threw a nervous glance over his shoulder. He was fairly sure he would have felt Ren approach, but he remained uncomfortable having this discussion in the open, even if the soldiers and servants in the courtyard all gave them a wide berth.

Phasma extracted something from her cloak, and extended it towards Hux. It was a thin object wrapped tightly in a piece of cloth.

'What is this?'

'A dagger’, Phasma said. ‘One of the daggers we recovered from the bodies of the King's knights.’

Hux stared at the parcel.

'You cannot mean to say you kept these weapons’, he said, his voice brittle. ‘Had we not agreed? Anything susceptible of answering to Snoke must be destroyed. How could you let such a dangerous object endure?'

For the first time in years, Hux saw Phasma's face contort into barely-repressed scorn.

'Forgive me, your Highness. For keeping a dagger that might one day serve to undo a greater evil than its own. I should like to extend the question back to you, Sir. How could you let such a dangerous object endure? The knight has been nothing but a liability since the King's death. A story to frighten your people, a threat to my soldiers... If my keeping this dagger was a mistake, it might perhaps still save us from yours.'

Hux let out a sharp intake of breath, hands coiled into fists. He couldn't remember ever arguing with Phasma before. It felt like yet another thread coming loose in a quickly unravelling canvas.

'Keep it', he hissed, pushing the dagger back against her armoured chest with more force than necessary. 'He might detect its presence on me. Have your soldier boy deposit it on the tower steps once you know Ren to be with me. If this concealing spell of his is still working, and if it has not addled his senses too much, you should also send the boy to retrieve Ren's sword.'

He fixed a piercing glare upon his general.

‘If you cannot break the sword before I kill him, that blood curse might backfire and kill me as well.'

Then again, perhaps this had been Phasma's plan all along. Hux didn't think so - Phasma had never wanted power, and she had no instinct for it. It made sense to trust Phasma over Ren. She had never failed him.

There was a tenacious whisper in the back of his mind. It sounded suspiciously like his father's voice. _Trust no one,_ it said. Hux ignored it.

He knew before he entered the tower that Ren would be waiting at the top of the steps. As he climbed, he wondered if Ren was there with orders to kill him, or perhaps to capture him. Maybe Ren would bring the force of the forest down upon him. With each winded breath that the long staircase wrenched from him, Hux felt threatened, as if his exhales were liable to drag forth from the bottom of his chest the roots and vines he had recently pulled from Ren’s mouth.

Hux gathered these thoughts and buried them, replaced them with thoughts of the war. He wondered how Snoke would have reacted to the threat of an attack from the south. But he realized he already knew what Snoke would have done. He would have poisoned the land. He would have buried a curse at the border, and sent one or two of his precious knights to patrol the area until his enemies were so crippled it would take them decades to recover.

Ren was not on the topmost landing. Hux pushed open the door that led to his rooms, and found the knight sitting on his bed, his armour in a disorderly pile at his feet. He was holding something.

‘You brought me flowers’, Hux said stupidly.

‘Of course not’, Ren replied. Sullen, as usual.

Hux walked over to the bed, casting an annoyed look at the black gear littering the floor. With his armour on, Ren was an awe-inspiring sight. Without, he became unsettling, with his too-long legs and his hunched posture. The clothing he wore under the armour was a combination of moss greens and earthly browns. Hux thought of these creatures that live under bridges and prey upon unsuspecting travellers.

The thing in Ren’s hands was indeed not a bunch of flowers. It was a branch, covered in green needles and peppered with small red berries, round and hollow.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

Ren made to throw the branch away, and Hux briefly considered swatting him across the head. He caught his wrist instead, the wrist that was still soft human skin and felt pleasantly warm beneath his fingers.

‘There is this tradition, among my people’, Ren said, decidedly not looking at Hux. ‘To make an offering... Boys will leave a shrub outside the door of a girl they’ve got their sights on. It’s mostly an excuse for a night of mayhem, but the choice itself has a meaning. Each tree has a signification, passed down along generations.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. I was riding back, and the branch got caught in my shoulder plate. I should have known...’

‘Well, what if I want your stupid branch?’ Hux snapped, and he snatched the offering from Ren’s hand, crushing a few berries in his harried grip. ‘What does it mean, then?’ he went on, trying to regain his countenance. ‘What is it?’

‘Yew’, Ren said. ‘They gave it to the frightening girls, the ones with the wicked minds and the corrosive touch.’

Hux set the branch down on the chest at the foot of his bed.

‘Get up’, he ordered, and saw Ren obey with some satisfaction, rising against him until their legs were touching and Ren's face was level with his own. Ren's hands came up to settle on Hux's hips. A thought escaped Hux, an unforgivable lapse. _Hurt me. I dare you to hurt me. Give me a reason to –_

Ren let out a surprised huff against Hux's cheek. He might have asked a question or, worse, tried to delve deeper inside Hux’s mind. Hux could not allow it. He surged forward, bringing their mouths together with too much force. He swallowed Ren’s startled gasp, slid both arms around his broad shoulders and delved deeper inside his mouth. He kept his eyes obstinately shut.

Ren’s response was hesitant. He held onto Hux and let his mouth be ravaged, spurring Hux on with an occasional hum of contentment. But Hux felt him hovering at the edge of his mind, reluctant to pry yet intrigued, and maybe even worried.

Hux was no stranger to pretence. He had perfected his ability to present an unaffected front since childhood. But this was different. He could not simply bottle up his secrets and hope Ren would not read them on his face. He would have to go so far as to erase any undesirable thought from his head, replace the truth of their respective betrayals with another, more pressing truth.

 _Let me have this,_ he thought, the request strident enough that he knew Ren could not ignore it, that it would drown out everything else. _I cannot delve inside your thoughts the way you do mine. But this feels –_ Ren drove the heel of his hand hard against Hux’s back, and for a moment Hux lost track of his thoughts, as his erection brushed against the front of Ren’s tunic and he felt Ren’s hips buckle against him. _This feels like reaching inside you, Ren_.

A mumble against his lips. ‘Kylo’, Ren repeated, louder. And in Hux’s head, _You can have more than this. Take it. Take it all. It’s yours._ An image along with the thought, vivid, of Ren bent over on the bed and Hux standing over him, thoroughly sucking on two of his fingers before he knelt behind Ren – _Kylo,_ the voice in his head pleaded, because Ren had not lost his ability to be irritating at the worst possible time.

‘You take care of this, then, _Kylo_ ’, Hux ordered, and pressed his fingers to Ren’s swollen lips. Suddenly, blissfully, there was nothing else to think about. Nothing could have been more urgent than this, Ren’s hot mouth and the tight suction drawing his fingers deeper, Ren’s heavy-lidded eyes fixated on him, the dark pupils blown wide. Hux tried to remember why he needed to hold himself back, and struggled not to rut against Ren and end this here and now, while they were still fully clothed and standing.

He pulled back his fingers, breath stuttering at the way Kylo’s lips followed, lingering against his fingertips. ‘Oil’, he muttered. ‘You fool. Behind the washbasin.’

He waited by the bed, swaying slightly, willing the frantic beating of his heart to quiet down. He held his fingers to his mouth, found the smell he had chased inside Kylo’s mouth, the warm, churning undergrowth of the forest after a rainfall, damp earth and scattered pinecones, and that penetrating odour of resin.

Hux nearly jumped when Kylo pressed the cool bottle inside his hand. For a moment, the knight’s long fingers wrapped around his, securing the bottle, and Hux stared at their joined hands, feeling something like worry edge back into his consciousness. This fleeting hesitation dissolved as Kylo moved around him to kneel by the bed. Hux followed in a daze, trying to unscrew the lid as Kylo wrenched down his trousers. He succeeded only in upending the entire bottle over his fingers.

Hux told himself that they had been in otherwise intimate situations. He had delved into the knight’s memories, had seen him wounded, stripped of pride and void of strength. He had spent several nights pressing himself back against his naked form, committing to memory the shape of his body. He had taken his throbbing cock inside his mouth and swallowed every last drop of the warm and bitter seed. Yet as he hitched up the tunic, his lips slowly moving upwards, following the curve of Kylo’s spine, as he leaned his forehead against Kylo’s damp skin and pushed oil-slick fingers deep inside him, it felt as if something had dissolved between them. An interposing presence. Hux realized it was the forest, the whole oppressive weight of it suddenly gone, leaving them alone in the cold chamber. He no longer tasted resin on Kylo’s skin but a more diffuse, musky smell that was the knight’s alone.

‘This is ours’, Kylo muttered, pushing back against Hux’s fingers, gripping the covers in a white-knuckled grip. ‘I won’t... share it.’

Hux allowed himself to close his eyes against Kylo’s back as he whispered a few unintelligible words of thanks. Kylo only thrust his hips back harder, a silent demand Hux wouldn't have ignored even if the intrusive forest had unexpectedly returned. He tore at the front of his trousers, took himself in hand and slowly pushed in. Gritting his teeth, he tried to hold still, but Kylo moved back a fraction of an inch and Hux forgot that he had meant to hold back. He gripped Kylo’s hip with one hand, the edge of the bed with the other, and went as deep as he could, savouring the keening sound this drew from Kylo, drawing back only to seek that sound again, and again, with each frantic thrust. In the midst of it, a thought slipped his mind - that it had been worth it, that he would rather be cursed than renounce this folly. He relished the knowledge that, for a moment, he ruled over a power greater than any damn empire. That he held together the pieces of a fractured soul and could, by his will alone, make them hold.

Kylo’s hand found his on the covers, seizing his fingers in a painful grip, the vines around the knight’s palm biting into his skin. Hux let his other hand dip between Kylo’s legs, fingers sliding against Kylo’s cock in time with his thrusting hips. He could feel himself get close, the tension building up at the bottom of his spine. Beneath him, Kylo came apart with a strenuous shout. It was in this moment that Hux made the mistake of opening his eyes.

It was a shadow at the corner of his vision, not quite seen, but understanding dawned on him against his every instinct. The soldier had stopped at the entrance of the room, and the longer he remained in place, the better Hux could see him, the whole ungraceful sight of him, his pallid face and his shocked stare, his pink mouth, slightly agape. All that Hux had so carefully driven away, the gaping wound of Kylo’s betrayal and his own guilt, fused into a burning, all-encompassing anger against that stupid young spy, and it was this anger that finally drove him over the edge. His vision blacked out for a moment, what little energy he had left seeping out of him as he collapsed against Kylo’s back. The knight was leaning heavily against the bed, head between his arms, trying to regain his breath. Hux did not need to read his mind to know that it would be sated and undisturbed. Kylo would not be able to focus on anything for another few minutes. Hux pulled himself out somewhat clumsily, and let himself sink against Kylo’s side. He felt like he might give in and cry like some pitiful child.

He couldn't help himself from gazing towards the pile of discarded armour, his eyes sweeping over the breastplate and armguards and the upturned helmet. The sword and its scabbard were gone.

As he stood in a draft of cold air at the top of staircase, Hux thought not of his stern, unfeeling father, but of his mother. He had few memories of her – she had refused to live at the fortress after a few years, returning to the small eastern province where her father was a magistrate. Hux did not remember her leaving, at least not precisely. What he did recall was a scene sometime before that. He had reached for a bowl of milk, and she had brought down her hand so hard upon his small fingers that the bowl had flipped over, spilling warm milk all over the table. ‘It is about time’, she had said, in her cold and yet melodious voice, ‘that you learnt the difference between what you want and what you need, boy.’

When it came to his parents, Hux had received so few teachings it had always been easy to set store by the ones he did remember. And although he had spent the better part of his life fighting against that austere edict of his mother’s, it seemed now to make sense like it never had before.

What he wanted was to stay within the warmth of the quilts and covers, arms tightly wound around Kylo’s chest, prodding the knight awake every few minutes for no good reason other than to pry a confused, sleepy endearment from his lips.

What he needed was to descend the cold staircase, bathed in the sparse, eerie light of the torches. To keep going until he found the dagger.

Hux rubbed his arms through the thin layer of his tunic. Looked over his shoulder at the dark shape in his bed. Looked ahead at the bleak stone slabs of the steps. Remembering how he had gathered his panicked thoughts some hours before, he locked them away, and willed himself to remember that he was an Emperor, and a General; the leader of many and the victim of none.

Descending a few steps, he found the dagger propped up against the wall, its short blade glinting in the torchlight.

Another folktale: a girl wedded to a monster, a strange creature that was a beast by day and a mystery by night. In the darkness of their bedroom, the claws retracted, the horns and the fur receded, and the girl felt the softness of skin under her fingers. Until one night, curiosity got the better of her, and she brought a candle close to her husband’s face.

It might be that he killed her, or she him. Maybe they both lived, or perhaps he sent her away. As with so many other tales, Hux had never heard the ending of that story. He understood the impulse, though. One could only remain in darkness for so long. Eventually, the match must be struck, the truth must be faced.

He knelt onto the bed carefully, crawled towards Kylo on his hands and knees, the dagger firmly in hand. He had not let himself think how it would happen. When Kylo rolled onto his back, his eyes unreadable in the darkness of the room, it was both a shock and a relief. He realized he could not have brought himself to attack the knight in his sleep. And yet now that he was awake, he found himself at a loss, and unable to proceed.

‘Well, do it, then’, Kylo said, surprisingly alert. His voice slid into a slow, mocking drawl that Hux had not heard in a long time. ‘If this is what your Highness wants.’

‘Of course it’s not what I want’, Hux said, bitterly, and with a sharp intake of breath, he rose onto his knees, and plunged the dagger into Kylo’s heart.

The movement propelled him downwards, so that he immediately collapsed against Kylo’s chest, his cheek against the bleeding wound. As a bone-wracking shudder coursed through Kylo, Hux shut his eyes, his hand going lax on the hilt of the dagger. He did not understand, at first, that the rending sob rising from the bed had come from his own blood-drenched lips. Kylo’s hand came up, fumbling against the crown of his head before it fell, heavy, on the back of his neck.

‘I felt dead’, Kylo said, voice slurred. ‘Until I pledged myself to you.’

‘You cursed me’, Hux croaked, his hands already trying to stem the flow of blood. ‘That blood oath was a curse’, he repeated. He felt at once hollow and fit to burst, unwilling to comprehend what he had done and yet conscious that it might have been a mistake. ‘That blood oath’, he stammered. ‘It was a curse.’

‘It was the only way... The only way I knew’, Kylo muttered. There was a heavy silence as he mustered the energy to speak once more. ‘To defeat Snoke’, he said, finally. Hux felt Kylo’s final breath rattle out with the end of that sentence, a painful exhale and then another silence, heavier than the last.

He looked at his hand, bloody and shaking, croaked out another, pathetic sob, and then turned his face fully into the covers to release his confusion in an ear-splitting cry. He shouted until the back of his throat was raw and the sting in his eyes had become a blur of unshed tears. When the first cry subsided, he found enough energy for a second, hands digging deep into his hair, pulling at the roots as if he might tear open his skull and spill its contents onto the blood-soaked sheets. His shout ended in a brutal, heaving cough, and he directed his aimless rage at Phasma, who had failed to break the sword, and now he would die, he would die convinced he had destroyed the one thing he held dear, his mind warped by a curse into loving some bewildering nightmare.

Hux barely noticed that the door had been flung open, and that Del the soldier stood in the room, still out of breath after his frantic climb. He had spoken, but Hux had not heard, and now he tried again, louder.

‘The sword is destroyed! Your Highness, the curse is broken.’ Even as he spoke he seemed to doubt his words, his eyes having fallen upon Hux’s prostrate form, his wild-eyed stare and his face drenched in blood.

‘The curse is broken’, Del repeated, as if the truth of his words might eventually sink in.

And eventually, it did. Hux realized he was not coughing blood, that the soreness in his throat was a result of his foolish yelling.

The blood oath was gone, but the emotional turmoil remained, the guilt and the grief, the mind-numbing horror. He realized then, finally, that none of what he had felt for Ren had been a result of the oath. Now the oath was gone, and Ren was gone, and Hux was left with these useless feelings, and the instinctive knowledge that they would gnaw at him until he tore his own heart from his chest.

There must have been a spell on the room, Hux thought. Though there was a war raging in the south and the tower was surrounded by a fortress that never slept, it seemed as if the room remained outside of time, at once a refuge and a trap. He sat on the bed, his eyes staring, unseeing, at the tapestry on the wall. He blinked until the pattern came into focus. Tree trunks sinking into the marshes. The Emperor wading among them, a bearded ghost.

In the foreground, Hux noticed a slinking black line, which he had always thought was driftwood, and which now looked, disturbingly, like a snake. He looked up towards the trees, remembering the way they seemed to part at the top, where the yellow and white pinpricks of stars were set in sharp relief against the dense green of the branches. In the pale haze of moonlight, the brighter knots of fabric no longer made him think of stars, but of so many eyes, as if there had been creatures lying in wait within the trees, ready to descend upon the army.

‘We only see what we want to see, don’t we’, Hux mumbled, and was surprised to hear a voice answer him.

‘I don’t know, your Highness, Sir.’

Hux looked dumbly in the boy’s direction. He had remained where he stood, the strain of the last few moments visible in his livid features. He was wrenching his hands, probably convinced Hux couldn’t see him, and at times he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as if he were dancing on too-hot coals.

‘Tell me, Del, or whatever your name is’, Hux said, feeling with some relief his voice return to him, the customary slyness and mockery magnified by a distress he would not contemplate. ‘Does this look like a snake to you?’

‘I don’t know, Sir’, the boy answered. This was not, however, the sort of answer deemed acceptable on the part of an imperial soldier. The boy moved hesitantly towards the tapestry, attempting to get a better look. As he waved in and out of the shadows, Hux could see the remnants of the spell gliding over his skin. From one angle, he was instantly forgettable, his uniform itself seeming drained of colour. From another, when the light from the window hit him just right, Hux caught a glimpse of something else, of deep chestnut hair and eyes that were not evasive but painfully earnest.

‘I think’, Del said, leaning towards the black line.

Hux was not to hear what Del thought. There was a great heaving sigh at his back, and he felt the covers slide from under him. He recoiled with such force that he fell from the bed, and he stared up, uncomprehendingly, as Kylo’s body moved, curling in on itself, one hand reaching for the hilt of the dagger.

The shock was so great that for a moment all Hux could feel was horror.

He had spent endless nights on the eastern and western fronts, sitting out a storm in a flooded tent, trying to stay awake in a pit of ice, knowing that to sleep would mean certain death. And yet, this night was somehow worse than any trial he had ever faced. It did not seem endless, but rather like a continually renewed cycle of relief and terror.

Hux somehow got to his feet, and rushed around the bed to Kylo’s side. The cursed dagger clattered to the ground. There was still blood dripping from the wound in Kylo’s chest, but it did not flow as it had before. Instead, it slithered down Kylo’s side and along the covers. There was something unnatural about its slow progress towards the ground. Hux thought of a water snake, of grasping roots.

He knelt on the carpet, making sure to stay clear of the rampant blood. He reached tentatively towards Kylo’s face, obscured by his matted hair. Though Kylo’s hands were once more inert atop the covers, the knight’s chest rose and fell, and he had struggled to a half-sitting position, leaning heavily onto one elbow. Hux threw caution to the wind and slid trembling fingers through Kylo’s hair, brushing the black strands away from his face. Kylo’s eyes were open wide, his dark stare fixed, unblinking, upon Hux. Hux would not let go of the tangled hair, and he rested his hand at the back of Kylo’s head, taking a shaky breath.

‘How?’ he whispered, the fragile hope making his voice quaver.

Kylo did not answer at first. As his breathing settled, Hux had time to search his features and hallucinate all manners of terrifying things. Accusations, hatred, a forbidding remoteness.

Then Kylo breathed out once more, seeming to shake off an unconscious shiver. ‘You have to do it again’, he murmured. The relief Hux felt upon hearing his surly voice only lasted a second. ‘You have to kill me again.’

The dreadfulness of it all startled a bewildered laugh out of Hux’s constricted chest. ‘Certainly not!’ His fingers tightened on Kylo’s scalp, and he reached hesitantly towards the bleeding wound, half-thinking to cover it with his hand.

Kylo caught his wrist in a feeble grip. ‘Don’t touch it.’ Each time he spoke, it felt as if he were trying to contain something within him, something that might overspill should his heartbeat quicken. ‘I know now’, he mumbled. ‘I know how he made them.’

Hux’s attention was so focused on the low rumble of Kylo’s voice that it took him time to notice that he felt something, both in the hand that cupped Kylo’s head and in the arm Kylo had seized. It was a pulse, distant, not quite perceptible. It thudded with a deep, relentless regularity beneath Kylo’s skin. Hux knew, just as he had known those parts of Kylo that were the forest and not his own, that this was not the knight’s pulse. He felt a renewed sense of dread.

‘You wanted curses, did you not?’ Kylo said. ‘Well done, General.’ His voice grew lower, rougher, a mockery of his previously hushed tones. ‘You have built one.’

‘This is hardly the time to discover sarcasm’, Hux admonished him. He tore his wrist from Kylo’s grip and took a hold of the knight’s arm, pulling him into a sitting position. ‘Tell me what I should do. Anything. I will do it. I will go to the forest.’

‘There’s no use for that’, said the voice that was not quite Kylo’s voice, but a raspier, frightening echo. Hux suddenly had the impression that there was something inside Kylo, and that whatever it was, that thing was laughing at him.

Kylo lowered his head, his hair falling back into his eyes. He kept still for a few seconds. When he looked up from between hunched shoulders, he seemed like himself once more. The blood had stopped running. In the dark, the wound in his chest seemed to have been sealed, leaving behind a black scorch mark.

‘You need to kill me’, Kylo said, and sensing Hux was about to protest once more, he placed a large hand over Hux’s mouth. Hux could still feel the dim, alien pulse inside Kylo’s palm. ‘Don’t use the dagger’, Kylo ordered. ‘Destroy it. Kill me with something that hasn’t been cursed. Burn the body, scatter the ashes, and do it as far from here as you can.’ His voice picked up, as if he needed to speak as much as he could before it was too late. ‘If you fail to do this now, you won’t have the power to destroy the curse yourself. If that happens, find Luke. Find my mother, she will know where... Where you can find him.’

Kylo lifted his hand, stared at Hux thoughtfully, and then leaned in for a cold, lingering kiss. ‘For what it’s worth’, he muttered, nudging Hux’s nose with his own, ‘I would give my life for you again. But let this be the last.’ He turned his head slightly, letting it fall against Hux’s shoulder. Hux thought, briefly, that Kylo meant to embrace him. He was taken aback by the collapse of the knight’s body, the heavy mass of it suddenly sagging against him, pushing him off the edge of the bed. He tried to hold Kylo up, slinging an arm around his chest, careful to avoid the black scab of the wound. Reaching for Kylo’s hair again, he uncovered his face. Kylo's eyes had rolled upwards, and there was a single trail of black blood creeping from his nose to his mouth.

Despite an overwhelming instinct to run as far away from this room as he could, Hux didn't move a muscle. He wouldn't have let go if his army had stormed the tower, or if the forest itself had risen against him. He focused on the pulsation he still felt inside Kylo’s body. And because this was what he had been born and bred to do, he discarded the unfavourable odds, and formulated a plan.

‘Help me’, he said, his voice ringing loudly within the stifling walls of the room. It was entirely possible that the soldier had left. Anyone in their right mind would have – but Hux counted on the concealing spell, which had addled the soldier’s senses. ‘Shake off this stupid spell and come and help me’, he barked, his hand slipping on Kylo’s damp skin. He did not hear the soldier approach, but suddenly he was there, hovering hesitantly by the bed, his arms dangling at his sides.

‘We have to take him to the stables’, Hux said. ‘You will help me. Do not touch the wound. Do not step in the blood.’

Del turned a drowsy, unresponsive gaze towards him, and Hux thought with a pang of despair that this was it, he would fail, he would be bested by time and by his own lack of strength. But the boy slowly reached out, and gripped Kylo’s upper arm. He braced his knee against the bed, and together, they pulled the knight up, each of them lifting one of his arms over their shoulders.

They emerged from the tower stairs into the warm air of a late summer night. The first courtyard they crossed was empty, but the training yards were bustling with activity, soldiers preparing to depart for the south front, others returning from the town. In the torchlight, every silhouette was a blur. Hux hoped against all odds that they would pass unnoticed, the half-invisible soldier, the Emperor of thousands with his ruffled red hair and his face covered in blood, and the unconscious knight, whom none in the fortress had ever seen before without his helmet, and who now hung limp between them, shirtless and with his face exposed, pale and wan, for all to see.

They skirted around the yards, Kylo’s booted feet scraping against the cobblestones as they dragged him around carts and away from the light of the braziers. When they finally reached the stables, they found a similar scene, a constant rush of men and women diving in and out of the storerooms and stalls, amidst the cries of the marshal, who supervised the apparent chaos at the top of his powerful lungs.

‘We need a horse’, Hux cried out to Del, trying to be heard over the surrounding din. ‘Go and get one.’

Del began to slink towards the stables, his pace still desperately slow. Hux refrained from kicking his receding backside, shouted out, ‘The black horse! Get his own horse. The others won’t carry him.’ Try as he did, he could not remember the horse’s name. ‘It’s a crazy, foolish beast’, he called again, hoping this description would suffice.

He leaned against one of the walls of the courtyard, having let Kylo sink to the ground, in the shadow of a tower of heavy barrels. The knight’s body was wracked with tremors that had only grown in intensity since they had left the tower. Hux wasn't sure what Kylo had meant with this talk of curses. He was dimly conscious that it was better, perhaps, if he didn't know. He blinked against the light of the braziers and torches, observing the flurry of activity in the courtyard. There was a war, he remembered. His empire was in danger.

He had left his crown in the tower, discarded on the back of a chair.

He was brought back to himself by a hand on his arm. The soldier had returned, and he led Kylo’s horse by the reins. The great beast was huffing disgruntledly by the boy’s shoulder. The horse had been saddled, Hux noticed with some relief. He bent over to grip Kylo’s arm, and managed, somehow, to pull him up again.

‘The Empire is grateful for your service’, he told Del, and prepared to lift Kylo onto the saddle with the boy’s help.

‘I am not loyal to the Empire’, the boy muttered. Hux would not even have spared him a second glance if he had not added, strangely heartfelt: ‘I am loyal to you, Sir.’

Under Hux's swift look of surprise, he babbled nervously, a dam breaking: ‘ever since I joined the army, you have been, for me...’

‘There is no time’, Hux interrupted. ‘Later. Maybe. Help me.’

Together they pushed and heaved and eventually, they managed to hoist Kylo onto the horse. Hux placed a hand against the horse’s side and felt a shiver course through its strong frame. The veins on its great black head stood out prominently against the smooth, silky skin. Hux issued a silent prayer that the horse would hold out until they reached their destination. He lifted a foot in the saddle, grabbed the pommel and pulled himself up behind Kylo, sliding his arms around his waist to seize the reins.

He cast a final look at the soldier. ‘If there comes a time for gratitude’, he said, mustering the battered remnants of his imperial dignity, ‘I will remember you, Del.’

He clicked his tongue, shook the reins, and the horse set off towards the gatehouse. It trotted slowly at first, but then quickened its pace to a satisfying canter. Hux fled from the fortress amidst a blur of lights, leaving only a passing impression on the harried silhouettes that crowded the drawbridge. A strange vision of a fuming horse and of a man with fiery hair, vanished before it had fully taken form.

Hux knew it would not be enough to simply ask for forgiveness this time around. Yet he had little choice but to hope the forest would listen, and that they might reach an agreement, somehow. He would have offered his life hadn't he known, instinctively, that it wasn't worth the price of Kylo’s. A life of indentured servitude, perhaps, mending trees and guarding the woods against human woes. Or something grander. The fortress, which Snoke had protected so persistently against the steady spread of the woods, cutting down any shrub that took the liberty of growing too close to the ramparts. He would have given the very empire, from the frozen mountains to the southern plains, from the villages by the coast to the town at the edge of the woods. He had an inkling, however, that the forest wouldn't be interested in lives, but in the land.

Hux didn't question whether his quest was lawful and right. He had been motivated by a rampant hunger for most of his life, a selfish craving that he'd never quite known how to satisfy. Now that he knew what he wanted, he would do whatever it took to regain it. He had never harboured any illusions about himself – he knew that he wasn't a good man.

As the horse stepped within the shadow of the trees, Hux recalled another flight to the woods, the tedious progress through the snow on his way to retrieve Kylo’s body from a distant clearing. He had been on the brink of great success, and yet ready, even then, to throw everything away for Snoke’s dark knight.

He held the reins with his arms wide apart, careful not to touch Kylo’s body. Somewhere between the town and the forest, the knight’s skin had begun to singe the sleeves of his tunic, the fabric rotting away with a strong smell of mildew.

He let the horse follow its own lead, weaving through the trees. It seemed eerily prescient at times, but it would then suddenly walk straight into a thorn bush, and Hux had to cajole and plead for the beast to take the necessary steps backwards.

The forest had changed. It wasn't the dense, impenetrable mass that Hux had tried to navigate on his way to Kylo, so many months ago. But the paths he had once followed on his way to war also seemed to have disappeared. The trees were surprisingly silent. The insidious murmur that had once seeped under Hux’s skin, and which had frightened the neighbouring farmers, had dissolved into an uneasy quiet. The only sounds were the faint rustle of the wind through the branches, the noise of the horse’s hooves on the thick carpet of brown needles, and the occasional chirping call of a bird, too distant to be reassuring.

The sun rose. Hux edged backwards on the saddle, trying not to look at the web of red lines that had appeared under Kylo’s skin. Some of these winding veins glowed faintly in the sunlight. Hux reached carefully towards the back of Kylo’s head, fingers brushing against what had at first seemed like a shiny black clump of hair. Before Hux's incredulous eyes, the clump came away and unfurled in his hand. It was a thick, glossy feather.

The trees opened onto a clearing, and the horse came to a halt at the edge of it. It would go no further, nor would it double back, or walk around the glade. Hux hesitated for a moment, but eventually, he let go of the reins, and jumped off.

The clearing wasn't very wide. There were tree stumps close to the ground, covered in moss. The ground itself was overrun with weeds and flowers, some of them reaching up to Hux’s thighs. Far up above the pines, the sky was softening to a pale blue colour, and Hux could see the top of a mountain beyond the trees, one of the soft green mounds that marked the western border of the Empire.

Hux wrapped his hands in his sleeves and grabbed Kylo’s belt on either side of his waist, pulling him down from the horse. He tried not to touch his skin, but the weight of Kylo’s unresponsive body knocked him over, sending them both to the ground. He felt his arm collide with Kylo’s back and though he jerked away, he heard a menacing hiss. After a careful inspection of his tunic, he found the place where the cloth had rubbed against Kylo’s flesh. The fabric was sinking inwards, covered in a shiny film through which tiny red bubbles erupted, eating up the threads. Hux only spared a moment’s thought before he pulled the small knife at his belt and tore off the patch of fabric, wincing when the knife snagged against his skin. Thankfully, the corruption had not yet reached his arm.

He moved over to where Kylo had fallen and seized his ankles. Even through the leather of Kylo’s boots, Hux could feel the curse calling out to him, a vile whisper that begged to be heard, in turns lewd and haunting. The voice pursued him relentlessly as he dragged Kylo towards the middle of the clearing. It would give him back his crown, it said. It would return Kylo to him, it would mould him into the creature of Hux’s dreams, into that engulfing darkness Hux had once so desperately longed for. And when Hux did not answer but tried to close his mind to it, the whisper became a screech. He felt the leather melt under his fingers as the curse’s voice broke through his barriers and buried his exhausted mind under so many more offerings. It would tear the world to shreds. It would find his father’s body and break each of his bones into a million pieces. It would flatten every mountain to the ground. It would start an inextinguishable fire in the forest, until all the trees contorted and screamed.

Hux let go of Kylo’s boots as he tried to regain his breath. As he straightened his back, he looked up and froze.

There was a girl at the opposite end of the clearing. She stood close to one of the trees, her hand pressed reassuringly to its bark.

Her steps were slightly hesitant as she stepped towards Hux. She wore light armour that looked like it was made of birch bark, white with smears of black. There was a wooden staff strapped to her back. Hux thought, at first, that she wore her hair in a braided crown, but as she drew near, he realized with a start that the crown was not made of hair, but of lithe, supple sprigs, covered in shiny green leaves and in a multitude of little white flowers. The crown wove over and under her hair as if it had its roots among the dark brown strands. It reminded Hux, unerringly, of Kylo’s hand.

He thought of the old witch.

He took a shuddering breath.

‘Are you a knight?’ he asked.

The girl knelt by Kylo’s side. She didn't touch him, but extended a hand, and Kylo’s limbs moved as if of their own accord, until he was lying on his back, his arms along his sides.

‘I am a knight’, she said, rising to her feet and brushing weeds and soil from her knees. ‘But you don’t know what a knight really is.’ She looked down at Kylo’s prone body. ‘He was a knight, too. A long time ago.’

‘You must help me’, Hux told her. ‘Help me save him.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I must?’ she repeated. Hux heard an undercurrent of mockery in her tone, and he rushed forwards, making to seize her hands. She took an instinctive step back.

‘You must’, Hux repeated. ‘I will not let you kill him.’ He meant to sound ominous, but it came out wrong, exposing the fear that he had not been able to shake since he had been confronted with the silence of the forest.

‘What happened to him?’ the girl asked.

‘I stabbed him’, Hux admitted, avoiding her eyes. ‘I stabbed him with a cursed dagger.’ And before that, he thought, I asked him to defy the forest, and he nearly drowned. ‘He was a fool to trust me’, he said out loud, though he wasn't really talking to the girl anymore. ‘And it was even more foolish of me to betray that trust.’

‘He showed it to me’, the girl said. ‘What would happen to him. He asked me to come and help you.’ She bit her lip, thoughtful. ‘I’m not sure that I can’, she admitted. ‘And I didn’t really want to come.’ She pointed at the thin white scar that bisected Kylo’s face. ‘I made that’, she said.

Hux drove the heels of his hands into his eyes. ‘He called you?’ he said, trying to latch onto something, anything that might help him make sense of what was going on.

‘Yes. It’s this strange magic Ben does. He reaches into your mind, flips through your thoughts, like through the pages of a book. I used to love it when I was a child. There was nothing I would have wanted to hide from him. It amused me.’ She swung her staff over her shoulder, dropped it onto the ground and followed suit, crossing her legs. ‘It’s a dangerous power. Like any power that calls to the blood, and not to the forest. But I suppose he didn’t know, at first.’ She looked up. ‘You should sit.'

Hux hesitated, but his legs threatened to buckle of their own accord, and with a sigh, he joined her in the grass.

‘Why is the forest so silent?’ he asked.

The girl had thrown her head back and closed her eyes. She seemed to be communing with the surrounding woods, or maybe she was just ignoring him. Hux looked at the strange crown atop her head, at her fair features. At first glance, she looked bright and carefree, but there was harshness there as well, in the straight line of her mouth and in the sharp planes of her face.

‘It’s decided to ignore you’, she said after a while, cracking open a hazel eye.

‘Can’t you tell it I need its help?’ Hux pleaded, not caring anymore if he sounded impatient, or disrespectful. ‘I’ll do anything.’

She looked at him, considering. ‘You know, Snoke didn't invent this curse. He found it, in the forest. It was there before he arrived.’

‘What kind of curse is it, then? How do we break it?’ He risked a glance towards Kylo’s body, caught a glimpse of red and white veins showing beneath the skin, of a trail of what seemed like scales or feathers running down his arm. He averted his eyes.

The girl had followed the direction of his gaze, and she kept looking, as if she were taking the measure of the curse. ‘It’s a blood curse, of course’, she said. ‘Whenever a curse is repugnant, you can trace its source back to men. Snoke meant to use these curses to keep the forest out of his lands. The curse that Snoke found in the woods, the one Ben removed, it had been buried here by Ben’s grandfather. I don’t know why. I assume he wanted more power, and tried to merge the strength of the forest with his blood. It didn’t end well.’

‘There is something’, Hux told her. ‘Under his skin. A pulse.’

‘Yes’, she replied airily. ‘It’s the curse. He’ll die, eventually, and then we’ll only hear the curse. That’s why we should kill him now, while his heart still beats in time with the curse’s.’

‘We are not killing him’, Hux said through gritted teeth. ‘I don’t care if you’re a knight or the designed protector of the forest or Kylo’s long-lost sister. I’d rather give in to that curse than let you kill him. He said his uncle might help. Can you ask him for help?’

She raised her eyebrows again, a hint of a smile at the corner of her lips. It was more cruel than amused. ‘Luke? Do you know what Luke did? Fifteen years ago, Ben pledged himself to Snoke with blood magic. He betrayed us. He took all of us, Luke’s apprentices, and he led us into the woods. He had a change of heart, in the end, and we fled, him and me. But all the others, they died. Luke had to find the bodies and bury them. Thankfully, none of them was powerful enough to turn into one of these living curses, because then Luke would have had to kill them all over again. So no, I don’t think I will ask Luke to help Ben.’

‘Why are you here, then?’ Hux mumbled.

‘Because he spared me’, she said. ‘And given the hold Snoke had on him, it can’t have been easy. I owe him a debt. I’ll repay it if I can.’

‘What are you waiting for, then?’ He tried not to sound bitter, or demanding. He had remembered along the way that the girl was from the west, like Kylo, and that he had caused more deaths in the west than in the whole remainder of the Empire. That toppling mountain now seemed like a distant memory, a madman’s dream.

The girl propped her chin upon the back of her hand and gave him a slight smile. ‘I’m waiting for you’, she said. ‘I have a reason to help Ben. I don’t see why I should help you. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve been nothing but a nuisance to this country – to the entire world. Why should I return him to you?’

‘Then don’t!’ Hux exclaimed. ‘Save him. Keep him. That’s what he wanted, anyways, wasn’t it? He wanted to return to his family.’

‘That’s not what he told Leia’, she said, shaking her head. ‘He said he could never come back, that we would fare better without him. Typical Ben. And then he said he must go home. That there was someone waiting for him there. A brittle man, a roaring fire.’

Hux let out a bewildered moan.

‘Maybe you should stop complaining’, she suggested. ‘And tell me why I should help you.’

Hux tried to gather his scattered wits. He looked towards the edge of the clearing, where the horse was still lingering, watching the fallen knight.

‘Let the forest reclaim the lands by the coast, if this is what it wants’, he said. ‘The men from the town, the soldiers from the fortress might try to fight it, but without Snoke or Kylo there to guide them, they won’t know how to prevent the advance of the woods.’ He hesitated. ‘I will give up my empire. Others will come in my wake. It will rise again. But not in these lands. The only reason I remained in this fortress was the proximity of the woods. I knew Kylo drew his power from them. If I am gone, the army will move south. The lands there will be harder to defend, but easier to inhabit. And me... I will stay here. Whatever the forest wants from me. As long as the curse is broken.’

For a dreadful moment, he thought she would refuse. He even thought she might laugh in his face. But her eyes were wistful, not angry.

‘Alright’, she said. ‘Come with me.’

They left Kylo behind and set off among the pines, heading west. Hux had turned one last time before leaving, intending to take an image of Kylo away with him, but he wasn't sure, exactly, what it was that he had seen. There had been feathers and fur and a palpating red mass. He thought he might have dreamt it. It could have been a trick of the light.

By midday they reached the western edge of the woods, and the girl swerved right and began to walk along the first row of trees, obviously looking for something.

‘This is not the kind of spell Luke taught me’, she told Hux. ‘I figure if he was really against it, he’d stop me, but it goes against his teachings. I know it’s dangerous, this blending of powers, but I think it’s wrong to try to keep them apart the way Snoke and Luke did. You just have to be measured in the way you... Oh, there it is.’

She stopped in front of a tree, hands on her hips. It was another conifer, though it differed slightly in shape and colour from its neighbours, with the exception of the tree immediately next to it. Both trees were smaller than the other pines, and a lighter shade of green.

‘This is Ben’s tree’, the girl said, pointing at the tree in front of her. ‘The one next to it is mine. We planted them with Luke, a long time ago.’ She rested her hand against the bark of the tree, and then her forehead. Hux could see her whisper, though he couldn’t make out the words.

She stepped back, caught a hold of Hux’s arm and dragged him into the grassy meadow between the woods and the foothills of the nearby mountains.

‘Now, we wait’, she said.

They sat in the grass.

Hux leaned back on his elbows and watched the spread of the forest before him, row upon row of black and blue firs. He leaned further back and watched a bird of prey circle far over the treetops. The girl raised a finger in warning, and Hux became aware of a diffuse sound, brought along by the warm summer wind. A hiss like a high-pitched whisper. The trees had resumed their strange conversations. Hux did not dare think, or plead. He wasn’t sure what might offend, and he didn't want the silence to descend once more upon the forest.

Closing his eyes, he condensed his request into a single word. _Please._

The girl nudged his side, and he opened his eyes. At the edge of the forest, Ben’s tree was burning, a bright column of fire among the dark shuddering pines.

They watched in silent awe until the fire had died down, and all that remained of the tree was a long, tottering black spine. There was a gust of wind, and the whole trunk collapsed into a shower of black ashes. The wind lifted the ashes and carried them away, far from the forest and the waiting figures in the meadow.


	4. Chapter 4

Hux found a marked tree near the eastern edge of the woods. He'd learned to recognise the markings by now, fat white mushrooms growing in a circle on the bark, or a ring of discoloured moss at the foot of the tree. Sometimes the reason for the marking was immediately visible - the tree had been struck by lightning, or the wood had been overcome by rot. On other occasions, the tree seemed outwardly healthy. On such occurrences, Hux ensured that no sliver of skin was showing between his gloves and his sleeves, so that no splinter of the cursed bark would come into contact with his flesh.

This particular tree was dead. It must have been for a long time, and a notch near the base suggested that a villager had already considered using it for firewood, before changing his mind. A copse of trees stood closer to the village, trees that did not shiver and cry when the woodman's axe bit into their trunks. They did not rain poisonous bark on the woodcutter’s weathered arms, melting flesh to the bone. Hux had made that mistake once. The small scar on his forearm was warning enough not to be careless again.

The first time, he'd neglected to ask the forest's permission before cutting down one of the green firs near the hut. The girl had told him to do so, but it disturbed him. It felt too much like giving up a part of him that he wasn't ready to relinquish just yet. After the first few swings of his axe, he'd felt something crawling over his foot. Attempting to shake it loose, he'd realised it was a gnarled black root, slithering over his boot. It had taken all his willpower to remember the girl's advice and not to slam the axe into the root. He'd breathed out evenly, and waited.

'You must submit to the will of the forest', the girl had said.

And thus, as he took the axe to the tree, he intoned an inner litany of apologies, 'Sorry' and 'I am grateful' and 'I will plant a tree for every tree I cut' and again, 'Sorry, sorry, I am deeply sorry.' He certainly did not sound contrite, but he was frightened, and he hoped this would be enough.

The tree came down. Some of them groaned and some of them would cry, a long drawn-out sob that always seeped under Hux's skin, tugging at his frantic heart. But this tree had been dead for a long time, and it did not make a sound.

Hux wiped his brow with a dirty hand, sparing a look at the landscape on this side of the forest. He did not get many occasions to come to the eastern border anymore, and he was surprised to see how much the land could change, every single time.

The melting snow uncovered the thatched roofs of the nearby farm. Behind the ridge, sparse plumes of smoke alerted him to the continued but diminished existence of the town. Further off in the distance, the abandoned fortress had fallen apart further, as if years had gone by. A tree had cracked the roof of one of the towers and its thick branches reached up towards the sky. The tree must have grown inside his rooms. Its trunk should have been this wide, not after fourteen days.

There shouldn't have been a tree there at all.

Hux began to chop off the branches of the dead fir, less cautious now that he was no longer attacking a tree rooted deep within the intricate web of the forest's power. The menial work had the advantage of being mind-numbing. At night, he'd stagger to his pallet and fall into the black, soundless vat of a dreamless sleep. But the woodcutting and the cooking and the tidying of the shack were also a cause for bitterness. It was impossible not to remember that, not so long ago, hundreds had been at his command. Servants had obeyed his every request, and soldiers had carried out his orders. Advisors had stood at the ready to hear and dissect his battle plans, while courtiers had been prompt to applaud every time he opened his mouth.

He had no need to keep up a tidy appearance anymore. It was a troubling thought. Unless he was in the midst of battle, he'd always taken pride in the neatness of his clothing, in the sharp lines of his clean-shaven face. He'd cut his hair some days before, but he didn't have a mirror. He'd cut it as short as he could. The hair was no longer in his face, but it annoyed him anyways. He ran a hand over his skull and felt the strands sticking up in every direction. Different lengths, all of them. He wished he could but glance at his reflection again, if only to see how ridiculous he looked. How low he had fallen.

He might be able to barter a mirror from one of the peddlers by the lake when the summer came. Perhaps by then he'd have found the guts to clamber up the mountainside. The villagers on the opposite slope were bound to have wares to sell.

It seemed unlikely he would venture that far.

He crushed the tangle of dead twigs under the sole of his boot and tried to kick it away from the trunk. Once more, he brought the axe down, this time on the thicker branches near the base of the trunk. He braced himself against the handle of the axe, let out an annoyed huff as he took in all the work that remained to be done. He would have to lift the logs onto the small wheelbarrow, and drag the wheelbarrow back to the hut, pulling it over the roots and through the bushes, heaving it around uncooperative trunks. In times like these, he could have sworn the trees were sneering at him.

He heard the sound of a door banging shut. From a distance, he glimpsed a stout figure coming out from the sheep pen beside the farm. He took a few steps back, until he was once again within the shadow of the woods. He would rather not be seen if he could avoid it.

The town was already filled with rumours and second-hand accounts. This one had heard it from his farmer's cousin, this other from an old crone's niece. Everyone knew someone who had wandered inside the woods, and seen the Emperor's ghost.

Hux saw the value in such rumours. Fear would keep the small folk from the woods. But it might also encourage the foolhardy youth of the region to seek him out. Should the worst occur, they would find the glade where Kylo lied.

The farmer disappeared below the ridge. Hux's fingers closed around the handle of the axe. He lifted it up, brought it down. Willed himself to erase all other thoughts. Once he'd lifted the last log onto the wheelbarrow, he wiped his brow and caught his breath again, casting one last look at the overgrown towers of the fortress in the distance. Picking up the handles of the wheelbarrow, he started off into the woods. It was no easy task. The wheel caught on the roots, invisible under the snow. He had to push away armfuls of branches. On good days, the branches drew back of their own accord, letting him through, but apparently, this was not to be a good day. In a moment of brisk annoyance, he found himself wishing he could just lift the axe and chop off the dense mass of twigs and needles. The thought has barely formed inside his head that a branch sprung back and hit him square in the face, slashing his cheek. Hux narrowed his eyes at the offending branch, but he did not reach for the axe. Instead, he issued a silent apology. It would have been foolish to provoke the wrath of the woods in winter, when he depended upon the trees to find sustenance. Only two days before now, the small copse of firs by the stream had called out to him, as he bent by the river to fill up his flask. He'd found a wounded rabbit under one of the trees. The roots had acted like a snare, trapping its front leg.

There would be no rabbits today. Hux could feel the forest cracking and groaning like an old lady's bones. He'd be lucky if he made it back to the hut with a scratched cheek. He'd be lucky if he made it back at all. He used to think he would eventually learn the lay-out of the woods, but experience had taught him that beyond the occasional, reliable sign upon the bark of certain trees, the forest was nothing if not changeable. The stream itself had moved a few miles south once, only to return to its original place a few days later. One memorable time, Hux had had to spend a night in the open. He hadn't dared settle down under any of the irritable trees. He'd walked on and on until the sun came up.

‘I will clear the dead trees near the old foxhole’, he told the forest, securing the axe on his back as he leaned his weight against the wheelbarrow, pushing it forward through the barrier of the trees. ‘The ones that fell when that old spruce was struck by lightning. I’ll cut them down if it takes me the week. Let me just get home first. Please.’

Something slid around his ankle and he took a deep steadying breath, closing his eyes. He must not balk. Most of the forest bore him no ill will. It was cruelly playful rather than malevolent. Looking down at his boot, he saw that a small vine had wound itself around his ankle. He could see it slithering away in the snow. There was sharp tug as the vine tried to pull him off-course.

‘It's quite late for a game’, he said. He did not enjoy the forest’s games at the best of times. One of them had led him to be tied up by a great many ropes of ivy, three feet away from a bear den.

The vine pulled at his leg again. Hux’s hand lifted slowly, reaching for the axe. He'd also had to leave his load of wood in the middle of the forest one day, and there had been nothing left upon his return, not even the wheelbarrow.

Considering the thickness of the vine, he let his hand drop to his belt and pulled out his knife. _Sorry_ , he thought, as he went down on one knee in the thick layer of snow. _I am tired. I want to go home. Let me be, and I won’t hurt you._ The vine only tightened its grip, wrapping several more coils around his ankle. Hux sighed as he brought the knife down, close to the sprig.

He froze.

Reached out, and brushed his fingers, ever so slightly, against the rough little sprig. His breath caught in his throat. He sprung to his feet, the vine still in hand. It rose out of the snow, providing a path that he could follow. The knife had fallen, forgotten, to the ground. Hux abandoned the wheelbarrow without a second glance. He took off in pursuit of the vine, holding the end of it loosely in one hand. The moment he began to follow it, the creeper uncoiled from his ankle, freeing his movements.

Hux tore through the dark, sodden mass of unresponsive trees, much as he had done on the night Kylo had gone missing in the woods. This time, however, he did not follow the taste of blood on his tongue, but a tangible thread, which thrummed against his hand the closer he came.

He knew he shouldn't hope. The girl had said it might take years. She had declared, sententious, that undoing evil required far more time than it did to commit foul deeds. But Hux couldn't keep his heart from leaping in his chest. The thought of an end to the long dark nights was enough to make him forget the treacherousness of the woods. He began to run, missing the ditch by the stream entirely, and fell, headfirst, into the riverbed. Somehow he managed to cushion his fall, and he stayed there lying in the stream for a few minutes as his head spun. Blood unfurled in the stream from the cut in his cheek.

Eventually, he found the strength to turn over, and he looked for the vine, his mind reeling at the thought that he might have lost it. But he found it immediately, pulled taut across the two banks of the river, a few feet above his head. Picking himself up, he climbed out of the ditch with a firm grip on the snow-covered roots. Finally, he emerged on the other side. There, he latched onto the vine once more and resumed his pursuit, trying to be more careful this time.

He wasn't sure what he expected to find. The nightmarish vision he'd glimpsed when he'd left the clearing, all these months ago. Kylo as he'd last known him, with his shadowy eyes and his large hand covering Hux’s mouth as he pleaded for a knife to the chest. Ren as he'd found him in the clearing after the uprising, lying in the snow with a hopeless look in his eyes. The Ben he'd glimpsed in Kylo’s memory, a wilful child, eager to please and yet oddly defensive.

Hux slowed down, letting the vine fall from his hand.

In the end, it wasn't one of the many known variations of Kylo Ren that Hux encountered in the clearing.

The sight reminded him, instead, of the folktale that Kylo had once shared with him. There was an enchanted princess, asleep in a forest, and her rescuer, who failed to wake her up, let himself die at her feet.

Hux stepped into the clearing. The sky was clear above his head, dark blue and scattered with stars. The snow crunched under the soles of his boots. Kylo was leaning against a tree stump, his eyes closed. His skin looked faintly blue against the gleaming snow. His hair was slightly longer than when Hux had seen him last, and his usually clean-shaven cheeks were covered in a dark stubble. Although the snow had fallen heavily within the circle of the clearing, there was no trace of it on Kylo’s body. It was covered in greenery, the bushy branches of evergreens, thick clumps of heather, a light layer of ferns. He sat atop a carpet of bright green lichen.

When Hux had found Kylo after the uprising, he hadn't looked anything like the fearless warrior Snoke had boasted about. Disarmed, wounded, he had reminded Hux of a beaten animal.

This time around, Kylo looked like the fallen knight Hux had once expected to find.

Hux followed the snaking vine up to Kylo’s body and knelt hesitantly in the snow by his side. He reached up, expecting something to happen, thinking some manifestation of the forest would stay his hand. The wind remained a soft caress against his skin. The perpetual conversation of the trees went on uninterrupted, a grating, chattering murmur at his back. With the forest’s blessing or its indifference, Hux touched the tip of his fingers to the coarse stubble on Kylo’s cheek. Emboldened, he ran his fingers over every inch of the knight’s sleeping face, committing his features to memory. The shape of his lips and the broad line of his nose, the curve of his dark eyebrows, the long narrow slope of his jaw.

He wondered what he would do if Kylo didn't wake up. Would he lie down by his feet, curl up in the snow and let himself freeze to death, staring at the starry sky ? The girl had neglected to tell him what he should do in the event of being summoned back to the clearing by a strange vine. Hux parsed through his sparse knowledge of folktales.

A single story came to mind. A girl whose breath had been stolen by a wandering spirit, and who only regained consciousness when her lover breathed life back inside her.

Bracing a hand against the snow-covered tree stump, Hux issued a silent prayer to the forest that he was doing this right. He kissed Kylo’s cold mouth, coaxing his lips open with his tongue. No response came from the sleeping knight, although his jaw answered the pressure of Hux’s fingers. Hux’s tongue found its way past Kylo’s teeth. He released a cold breath of fresh winter air inside the knight’s mouth. Then he drew back and waited, his back ramrod-straight, his hands fisted on his knees.

When nothing happened, he resolved to try again. He took a deep breath and exhales against Kylo’s parted lips, letting his hand slide down the knight’s neck. Kylo’s pulse jumped under his thumb. His breath stuttered in his throat. His eyes snapped open.

Hux met Kylo’s gaze, brown eyes soft and thoughtful. This close he could see a few green smudges across his irises, like a sprinkle of moss. He was surprised to feel a pang of relief at finding the forest back inside those eyes.

‘It worked’, Hux croaked, too close still to be able to speak properly, and besides the proximity to Kylo’s smiling mouth was far too tempting. He stole another kiss, unable to repress a contented groan when he felt Kylo’s lips move against his own, the knight’s teeth grazing his bottom lip. He indulged himself for a few blissful seconds, then sat back on his heels, his bafflement getting the better of him.

‘How could it possibly have worked?’

‘I think the forest was amused’, Kylo smiled, indolent. The sound and cadence of his lazy voice was enough to make Hux’s head spin. He tried to brace himself on Kylo’s leg and found warm skin under the layer of ferns.

‘Amused’, he repeated, drily, trying to ignore the heat building inside his groin. There was nothing to be done, he knew, about his blushing cheeks.

‘Some idiot trying to rouse an enchanted sleeper with a kiss out of a folktale’, Kylo huffed. ‘The woods must have taken pity on you.’

He motioned for Hux to draw closer, and when he was foolish enough to comply, Kylo whispered against his ear, the raspy stubble tickling Hux’s skin – ‘Can you hear the trees? They’re laughing at you.’

Hux swatted at his leg ineffectually, feeling his blush deepen. In any case, he was too grateful to take much offence. He tried to muffle his own smile against Kylo’s shoulder, until it bubbled up into a fit of hysterical laughter and forced its way past his lips. He laughed and laughed, his shoulders shaking, tears streaming down his cheeks. Kylo’s long fingers slowly stroked the back of his neck. Hux sank against his side, forgetful of the snow and of the coldness of the open air.

They would get up, eventually, and he trusted Kylo would find them a path through the woods and back to the hut. There would be a fire – which Kylo would have to provide for, since Hux had abandoned the painfully obtained logs somewhere at the edge of the woods. And then he would bury himself inside Kylo, as deep as he could, until nothing could come between them. No curses, no wars, not the slightest sneaking doubt.

They would leave a sliver of space for the forest, he allowed, magnanimous.

**Author's Note:**

> @könighux had made lovely edits for this fic back when it was first posted: [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6150208) and [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6207061/chapters/14219965)


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